


Four Winds

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abusive family dynamics, Airships, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canon-Typical Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Depictions of claustrophobia, Imprisonment, Jealousy, Kidnapping, M/M, Magic, Multi, Non-Consensual Kissing, Sex-Ambivalent Jon (brief & nonspecific references), heights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 04:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 93,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26347384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Adventure on the high winds! Jon Sims signs on with a skybound ship in a desperate bid to find and rescue his stolen assistants, Tim and Martin, before their skins can end up adorning Captain Nikola Orsinov’s sails. However, there is more than he bargained for out on the air currents, from the odd behaviour of his crewmates to the magic he finds himself embroiled in. Elsewhere, Tim and Martin find unexpected sanctuary, but disaster is never far away, and they struggle to keep hold of one another in this world of the Vast, where there is no guarantee of port and it is always too easy to fall.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Michael "Mike" Crew/Tim Stoker, Melanie King & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 55
Kudos: 56
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020, including art from the fantastic syrren! You can find more of them on their [tumblr](https://syrren.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/sy_sketches) (give them a follow, they're amazing)! Thank you so much, it was great to get to work with you!
> 
> To skip straight to the art, please see chapters one, three, five, six, seven, nine and thirteen.

It’s not something he will ever admit, but there is no part of any journey that Jon likes better than homecoming. There’s a spark, of course, to each leaving – at the beginning of an expedition, a thrill of potential, the possibility of discovery. It’s enough to keep him pacing up and down the deck of whatever ship he’s on long after all the other passengers have settled, but it doesn’t come close to the feeling of getting back to Larkrest.

The village is nothing special, on its own. Just a handful of buildings, clustered together along a ledge too small for farming, and while it’s pretty enough, all cobblestones and ivy, the only thing that makes it stand out from anywhere else he’s visited is that it’s home. He knows the streets there, could find his way through their narrow tangling blindfolded, all the way back to the once-ramshackle building he’d just about been able to buy with the last of his grandmother’s inheritance. It’s the place where he can set down his cases and read, carry out his studies in whatever direction his curiosity takes him, and he always feels the first distant sight of it from the bow of a ship like a moment of hearth-warmth on his face.

Today, he’s going to miss that. The passenger ferry is too crowded, and he can’t make it far enough into the prow to see. There’s been some festival, he thinks, in one of the larger towns along the trading routes, and the deck is packed in so close that he could barely make it to leave his luggage ready to be unloaded. He stands, jostled in so close against another patron that he can smell the stale odour of alcohol on their coat, and resents.

He tells himself that he’s not losing out on much. It’s hardly going to be the most spectacular view of Larkrest, anyway – before, he’s been on ships that have sailed into port in the middle of the night, when the sky has been a wide span of glittering stars, tracing out the path home in its constellations. He’s come within sight at sunset and sunrise, seen the village painted in golden light and deep bronze shadow. He’s gazed out at it on midsummer’s afternoons, when he could have picked out every detail, believed that he could just reach out and lift up Larkrest in miniature, hold it safe in his palm.

Now, the weather is dour. There’s only the most lacklustre of breezes, that prods ineffectually at the masts and slides down the sails like grease, and it’s not enough to shift the thick fog that squats around the cliffs as they pass them, stone walls looming abruptly out of the curling white-out. Rain sits in the air in a fine drizzle, that hadn’t looked too bad when they’d set off, but had soaked him thoroughly before they’d been more than an hour away from the Sandstone Market.

The village will look too small, hunched in on itself and waiting for the worst of the weather to pass, but even knowing that can’t shift the irritation in Jon’s chest. He’s _meant_ to be up front, leaning on the rail – about now, he should be gazing across, trying to pick out the distant shapes of Tim and Martin, waiting for him at the dock like they always do, even though the ship is still too far out for him to tell them from a pile of cases.

He’ll be glad to have them, today. It hadn’t been a particularly fruitful trip – some landslips had meant that the market had less space than normal, so Jon’s usual book dealer had been half-distracted trying to make sure that the stew-seller she’d had to share her stall with wasn’t spilling food on her wares – so there isn’t a lot for them to carry, but his own hands are chilled enough that he’s worried that he won’t be able to get his bags all the way to the museum without dropping something. There’s nothing too fragile – a few more obscure books that he’d not seen before, a second guide to the wildlife of the area that’s more up to date than the one they have and with the added benefit of not having been chewed by a teething puppy, a few polished stones carved with unfamiliar designs, and a large-eyed grey creature in an antique birdcage – but he’d still rather not risk his purchases. Especially not the creature – Martin hates it if he drops them, which always puts Jon’s hackles up, since the only reason he’d started bringing back monsters at all was to distract Martin from everything else. Sasha always admonishes him if he says so, tells him that Martin has only ever broken anything once, but one smashed antique vase that they’d still been finding the pieces of weeks later is still too many.

This one, he thinks, is a good choice – it had been chittering unhappily when he’d moved it to the pile to be unloaded, and while Jon has no idea what it is, he’s seen that expression on the face of a lot of discontented cats – but it’s otherwise been reasonably well-behaved, watching Jon with a wide orange stare and occasionally nibbling on the fruit in the corner of its cage. It looks soft – should be popular with the visitors, and for as long as they’re willing to pay the museum’s entrance fee, Jon can afford to continue his studies.

Below his feet, the wood planking of the deck starts to shake, as the ship shudders with the effort of changing its angle. Jon tries to throw out an arm to steady himself, but when he stumbles, it’s into one of the shoulders around him, and he regains his balance without falling. Glancing around to get his bearings, for a moment he thinks that he can see something dark and immense moving smoothly through the fog above them – the hull of another ship, perhaps, passing higher among the narrow cliffs. It’s gone before he can say for certain, and he doesn’t bother to squint after it – instead he starts to elbow his way nearer to the edge of the ferry, hoping to be among the first to get off.

The crowd is moving, unevenly, uncertainly, and it’s difficult to navigate. Jon jostles into another man who’s pressing too close, trying to push him out of the way, but no one is paying him any attention. He grits his teeth, shoves a little harder, but the man’s only response is a vague wavering, like a tree in the wind.

Jon breathes in to snap, and the smell hits the back of his throat. It’s strong, distinct even among the odours of beer and sweat around him, makes his eyes water. Around him, the people are shifting more violently, agitated, a low murmur of horror rising up into the damp air. 

“Let me through!” he snaps, but it comes out as a rasp, his throat stinging with the fumes, and he takes a second to cough, force himself louder. “Let me _–_ that’s my home, let me through!”

The man next to him takes another push to his midsection, but finally gets the message, and shuffles to allow Jon to shove past him. It’s hard going, but Jon’s left any pretence of politeness back under the feet of the other passengers, forcing his way through, until finally another hissed demand has him staggering through to the edge, catching his arms on the cold metal of the rail.

He hardly feels it. They’re pulling out of the fog bank now, and Larkrest is abruptly close, closer than he’d thought it was. There’s smoke, dark and curling up from buildings whose lines are not what Jon remembers, and he can hear, almost drowned out by the noise of the other passengers, the sounds of crying.

There is no one waiting for him on the dock.

The image of that empty port sticks in his head, is the only thing that he can focus on, until he finds himself trying to shove out onto a gangway that’s barely been lowered properly, and one of the passenger ship’s attendants thrusts out an arm to stop him.

“Wait!” he orders, but Jon ducks around him, nearly slips over as his boots hit the rain-slick wood, and manages to slither his way down onto land. “Sir, wait, there might still be–”

Jon doesn’t hear how the warning finishes – he’s already running, and the only sounds that can make it into his consciousness are those that belong to his own desperation – harsh breathing, heart pulsing too fast, thin in the skin of his face.

It’s not far. He keeps wanting it to be more distant, because the smell of the smoke only grows stronger, tries to sit in his throat and choke him, and surely he’s wrong, surely the museum will just be a little further, miraculously unharmed, and the others are fine, just too caught up in helping the other townspeople to remember that he was coming back.

Then he’s nearly tripping on the sapling bushes that Tim had put around their front yard that year to try and brighten the place up, and he can’t hope otherwise anymore.

The museum is still burning, a handful of onlookers hurrying towards it, carrying pails of water. Jon searches them, sparing each a fraction of a second, but none of the faces that he’s looking for are there. He lets out a sharp, pained breath, and then bolts forwards, scrambling his way over a door that’s been ripped off its hinges.

Inside, the smoke is clustered closer, hanging around the ceilings of the rooms, and he throws an arm over his face, trying to keep it out of his lungs.

“Martin!” he shouts, hoarse into the material of his sleeve. “Tim! Sasha!”

The only response comes from the heat, that hits him hard in the face, like it’s trying to knock him over. He can’t see the fire yet, but he thinks it must be in one of the ground floor rooms – maybe, he hopes, they might still be able to get it under control, save the building and most of its contents.

“Tim!” he tries, so much louder this time that it pulls all the air out of his lungs, threatens to push him into a fit of coughing. He stumbles on, past the entrance desk, so flecked with ash that he can’t make out the colour that he knows they had painted it the year before.

The door through into the office is gone, too, and he wonders for a second if maybe they’d already come for his assistants, got them out, and they’re already safe, recovering somewhere else, but then he takes a step over the threshold, and that idea evaporates like the rain on his clothes.

There’s a shape, crumpled on the floor over by one of the desks – he recognises Sasha, half-falls to drop to his knees beside her. She’s just lying there, a trickle of blood wandering a slow and ponderous path down the side of her face, and his arm freezes partway through reaching for her shoulder, afraid to touch, to find out that he might already be too late.

Somewhere overhead, one of Martin’s creatures begins to scream, and he starts the rest of the way. Sasha twitches at the contact, coughs until her eyes open, and when she sees him, she clutches wildly at his arm, fingers slipping off his sleeve.

“Jon,” she manages, and then it dies off into a fit of swollen, ragged breathing that can’t even muster itself into wheezing.

“Shh.” Jon shifts, tries to gather her closer, pull her up, but she almost twists out of his hold, unbalances him. He hears running from the hallway, and nearly lets her collapse the both of them, sure that they’re finally getting help. “We’ll go outside, and then I’ll come back and I’ll find Tim and Martin and–”

“ _No_.” Sasha grips at his wrist, leaves soot-stains across his skin. Her eyes are too red, stung by the smoke, and he knows that he needs to get her _out_ , that she might have inhaled too much already, but the rawness of her cadence stops him in his tracks. “No, they – they _took_ them.”

She stares at him a second longer, but the effort of speaking must have been too much – she folds, and Jon struggles to hold her upright still, all the horrified questions that bubble from her statement dying in his throat.

* * *

Tim wakes by degrees. First, there’s a rough texture against his cheek that he knows has left wood grain imprints on his skin. Not his bed, and not anyone else’s, either, but that’s not unusual enough to rouse him properly. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’s fallen asleep at his desk, on the floor in the attic, or against one of the shelves.

He shifts slightly anyway, in search of something a little more comfortable, and one of his arms bumps up against something else, something warm. Some _one_ , he thinks, absently, and settles into them, gradually so as not to wake them.

As if it’s been shaken loose by his movement, an aching starts in his head. It’s a dull throb, radiating forwards from the back of his skull, and the small part of him that’s awake decides that he’s probably not at the museum. Jon hates it when they drink there, insists that their papers are delicate and priceless and should not have combustibles anywhere near them. Or, at least, he always _had_ hated it. Tim had seen him with a flask of something once, the night after that cursed vase had nearly killed Martin, sitting there with his hand white-knuckled around it. He knows it went back into the bottom drawer of his desk, but it’s not something he’s ever going to bring up.

He waits, but the ache doesn’t quiet again. Probably won’t, he supposes, without any real resentment. Not enough space in his head for that yet, though he does manage to pull together the vague idea that when he wakes up properly, he might remember a night that was worth it.

Sleep doesn’t come back. Instead, it recedes, clouding less and less of his mind. As it does, the pain sweeps in to take its place, sharpening into something angry and savage, tightening around his brain like a band of steel. With it, his balance shifts, until he’s half-sure that his legs are floating somewhere against the ceiling, and he has to open his eyes to steady himself.

It’s dark, and he’s grateful for that, at least – what little light there is comes trickling in from the curved edge of the room, illumination shifting between sturdy, regularly-cut planks. The space is tiny, and cold enough that his skin prickles with gooseflesh in all the places where he’s not been lying against someone else.

A ship, he realises, and lets out a low, long sigh. Jon’s going to kill him. Even if they don’t get caught, don’t have to pay the fine for stowing away on supply vessels, he’s still not at work when he should be, and with the museum getting ever more popular since that journalist had reviewed them, they need him there to charm the visitors. On the off-chance that he’s been lucky enough to end up on one of the routes that runs exclusively between Larkrest and the nearest farm, it’ll still take him far too long to get back.

He should know better, and so should his liaison.

Tim props himself up, cranes over to get a better look at their face, and his arm nearly falls out from under him, his heart dropping down to somewhere around his intestines. He blinks, trying to force his eyes to see someone else, _anyone_ else, but they don’t.

Even in this dingy half-light, he’d know Martin’s face anywhere.

Tim groans, as softly as he can manage, and scrubs his free hand over his face. Not Martin. He refuses the idea that he wouldn’t remember his first time with _Martin_ , but when he reaches out for even the faintest hint of what might have happened, all he comes up with are his own thoughts from slow days at the museum, watching Martin work and idly playing with the idea of him, the odd impulse to kiss him on nights they’ve visited the tavern.

Maybe this time, he hadn’t rejected any of it. He’s sure he can build an idea of the night, of wandering vaguely homewards from the tavern and having just one moment, in the dark places between the street lamps – a shared glance, a long, savoured kiss up against the wall. But it’s all still just a construction, and if whatever had happened had been so urgent that they’d gone to the docks instead of home, he wants to _remember_. 

Martin might, he supposes, and there’s an edge to it. There are good reasons why he’d never acted on any of the thoughts he’s had about Martin, the way that he might with a stranger. They work together. What happens between them lingers. It had taken months to rebuild things with Sasha. However Martin responds to this, that line’s been crossed now.

Tim leans over a little further, trying to gauge Martin’s sleeping expression before he gets on with the awkward process of waking him. Stops, with his fingers just splayed against Martin’s shoulder. There’s a dark stain on the wood beneath his face, smeared at the edges. Blood.

He remembers. Fuck, he remembers. They hadn’t slept together, but any relief there might be from that is swallowed up by a hollowing space in his chest. Horror, swamping in around the rest like it means to drown him.

It had been early afternoon, the kind of grey day that’s almost hypnotic, if Tim lets his eyes catch on the patterns of the curling drizzle beyond their window. He’d been swapping speculation with Sasha, that had started around what they thought Jon might find at the Sandstone Market and then devolved into how irritable he was going to be when he got back. Martin had been passing the doorway intermittently, trying to prepare for whatever creature Jon might bring back for him, more an exercise in anxiety than anything else, since it’s impossible to prepare adequate housing for something he knows nothing about.

All familiar rituals, up until there had been a sharp clatter from the hallway, something heavy falling. Tim had scrambled up, rushed through, but where he’d been half-expecting to see Martin in a crumpled heap, there were just the branches that he’d been carrying, scattered across the floor.

He’d opened his mouth to make a comment about it – nothing that would sting, just something to intercept any of those stuttered, almost-afraid apologies, like Martin still thinks it might ever occur to Jon to send him away – but then he’d seen his face. Too pale, mouth slack, turned towards the door at the end of the hall.

“Martin?” he’d asked, but Martin had held up a hand, glanced back at him, eyes wide. Tim had gone quiet, and at the edge of his silence, he had been able to make out a distant peal of bells, ringing with no order or precision, just a clamouring that he feels more than hears. “Isn’t that–”

There had been no breath left to finish his question. Something had struck his chest, hard enough to knock all the air out of him. He has no memory of hitting the floor, but he knows from the pain in his head that he must have.

“Martin?” Tim shakes him, moves in a little closer, squinting for movement – there’s a slow rise and fall to his chest, a deep rhythm that he hates to have to break, drag him from whatever dream he might be having into the beginning of a shared nightmare. “Martin, wake up.”

“Tim?” Martin moves, rolls back into him – his voice is far, far too loud, and Tim claps a hand over his mouth in an effort to shush him, leans down over him in a way that one corner of his mind insists on telling him could’ve been borrowed from his efforts to remember that night that never was. Martin keeps trying to talk, and Tim recognises the question inflection even without hearing the words.

“I don’t know,” he hisses, because it’s the only answer he has. “I’m going to take my hand away, just, stay quiet, all right?” 

Martin nods, his eyes flickering over Tim, like he’s trying to make out detail in his expression. Tim pulls his hand back, and returns the scrutiny, tracing the source of the blood to a cut creeping out from his hairline. Makes sense, he supposes. Head injuries for both of them.

Then he remembers that he’s only the application of weight away from pinning Martin down, and leans away from him. He coughs, busies himself trying to find the least uncomfortable sitting position, faintly aware of Martin doing the same.

“The bells,” Martin whispers. “I think that was the alarm?”

“Yeah,” Tim says, so quiet that he thinks Martin must miss the slight shake to it. “Yeah, we got raided.” The word tries to swell in his throat, steal his voice away, and there’s no resistance he can put up. He’s only ever seen raids in the aftermath. Running home through a burning town, haunted community meetings where they tot up the missing and sit in empty silence, because they know that no matter what defences they might try to install, none of it will keep them safe. His parents, dull-faced, asking where he’d been, but he knows they’ve already decided that no answer he can give will ever be good enough. 

“Sasha?”

“I didn’t see what happened to her.” Tim’s gut twists at the idea that she’s out there, somewhere, waking up alone or with strangers. She’d cope, he’s sure, but she shouldn’t have to. “She’s not in here.” The space could hardly fit anyone else in it, barely over a metre between the curve of the hull and the flat, straight wall on the other side.

“Maybe they didn’t take her?” Martin suggests, almost painfully optimistic. 

“Maybe,” Tim says, and he might as well believe it, he decides. There’s never any reason to it, after all. Some people get taken, and some don’t. Maybe the raiders had found him and Martin in the hall and not bothered going any further into the museum. 

“What’s going to happen to us?” 

Tim bites hard at his lip. Martin’s question is too soft, too wavering, and he can’t answer it. There is no _after_ being taken. He knows that better than anyone, but he doesn’t want to open his mouth, tell Martin that they should be dead already, that as far as anyone left on land is concerned, they’re already gone. Over. 

“We need to get out of here,” he says, instead. Not possible, he’s sure. Even if they do manage to get out of the room, somehow hide from the crew until they get to port, make it down the gangway without being spotted, they’ll just find themselves in another town that’s being attacked, be snatched up again. 

It’s better, at least, than just sitting here and waiting to die. 

Martin glances around – his eyes have adjusted, Tim thinks, from the way that he actually seems to be considering the space now, rather than just staring blankly around it – and then pauses. He shuffles slightly, pushing himself a little more upright, stretches his legs out and then folds them in again. Tim opens his mouth to tell him that if he’s trying to find way of sitting that’s actually comfortable, he’s going to be disappointed, but then he pushes a hand across his mouth, and his face has gone wrong, his expression taut and fixed.

“Are you feeling okay?” Tim asks, head flashing with concepts of brain injury, of issues too great for him to tend to, things requiring medical help that he can’t get.

“I can’t–” It’s cut off by a hitch in his breath, abruptly coming too fast. “Tim – I have to get _out_.”

“That’s not _really_ something I can do.” Tim frowns, scrambles over the gap between them, and when he takes hold of Martin’s shoulders, he can feel him starting to shake. “Just… look at me, all right?” He remembers a vague mention of claustrophobia, once, when Jon had found some papers about a cave system a few towns over, and he’d idly suggested a trip to explore them. “Breathe with me.”

Martin blinks at him, like he’s trying to focus – Tim tightens his grip, though he has no idea whether it’s for his benefit or Martin’s. He goes to say something more, but then there’s a heavy noise from the other side of the wall, and he starts, hands slipping away from Martin as he wheels around to face the door.

There’s a moment of silence, and then light. 

* * *

Everyone that Jon talks to tells him the same thing. The ship had come, docked like any other, and by the time that it had occurred to anyone to look at it more closely, it had been too late. The attack had been sudden and violent and, apparently, utterly random. No demands, no threats. One moment where all had been well, and one where everything had been alight. Eight people dead outright – the majority had been trapped in fires. One had fallen from the dock while trying to intercept the raiders, and the other two had been knocked down on their way to do the same.

There are twenty one missing, including Tim and Martin, and Jon refuses to let himself add the two totals together. They’d been seen, by the few who’d been able to account for the taken, noting names and descriptions from their hiding places because they could do nothing else. Carried off, by things without faces.

The raiding ship had sailed off into the fog, and Jon can’t manage to rip from his head the idea that that might have been the one that had flown over the passenger ferry. Still nothing that he could have done, but his skull itches with the thought that they might have been so _close_ , and he can’t scratch it away.

Only getting further away now, he thinks, numbly. He’s pinned like a collector’s moth, sitting in the village hall at Sasha’s bedside, aching in place.

She’s been awake, in fits and starts. Said enough for Jon to piece together a fractured picture of what had happened at the museum. Martin had heard the warning bells first, but they’d been late to ring, because Larkrest had never in living memory been raided – too small, hardly worth it – and the ropes had rotted. Tim had gone to him first, and Sasha had been about to move into the corridor after him when the front door had been knocked in – they’d all been caught by debris, but Sasha hadn’t fallen until she’d stumbled back into the office in search of the key to the antique weapons cabinet.

Jon is silently glad of that. He expects that if she had tried to fight back, she’d be in one or other of those totals. For all that it’s near-buried by everything else, the horror and the helplessness, he’s relieved she’s alive. Relieved to know what happened, even if there’s nothing that he can do with it.

As it is, he watches her sleeping face for signs of distress, anything that will mean he should call the doctors over, and tries to keep his breathing steady enough with hers that he could tell if it changed, the last metronome he has to set his life by.

Once they tell him she’s recovered enough, he imagines that they’ll have to go back to the museum. The flames are out, now, and he’s been told that the build should survive just fine, though that news can’t seem to get purchase inside his head. None of Martin’s creatures had been hurt, only a very small number of the artefacts have been damaged, and those books that had suffered are all entirely replaceable. The neighbours had apparently been only too happy to help, make up lists and manifests, since that had given them some way to feel like they were helping, their own houses largely undamaged, since the museum had been the outer limit of the raid. Someone had even moved his luggage for him, and he’d been assured by a woman whose name he doesn’t remember that the little grey monster will be taken care of until he and Sasha are feeling up to taking it back.

The concept makes him feel sick. Just going back to work, like half his life hasn’t been severed.

He stares, until there’s a movement across his field of vision that startles him back to himself. The village hall seems to twitch around him, people scurrying around each other, and there’s a low murmuring to them, an undercurrent of nervousness that prickles the skin at the back of his neck.

Slowly, he pushes himself to his feet – his limbs have stiffened, and complain as he unfurls himself, but he ignores the uncomfortable pull on his muscles, and reaches out to catch the arm of one of the medics as she passes. She starts, goes to shove him away, and then seems to actually see him again, and relaxes.

“What is it?” she asks. “Is your friend any worse?”

“No, I – I don’t think so.” Jon gestures around, at the increased activity around them. “Is something happening?”

“Oh.” She pauses, considered him for a second, and then offers a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but there’s another ship docking. Looks like a merchant vessel.”

Across the room, another of her patients shouts, and she rushes away from him without another word. Jon doesn’t begrudge her, just turns back to Sasha, checks her breathing again. It’s still regular, more so than his, now.

He drifts from the hall without really deciding to – probably wouldn’t have, if he’d thought about it. For all that it’s starting to get a little too busy in there for him, that he knows Sasha is in good hands, he still doesn’t want to leave her. Like the others, he suspects, rushing to stand sentinel over those loved ones they have left, in the face of a possible further attack.

The weather hasn’t shifted, and the drizzle against his face is cold and clean and he welcomes it. Moving a little further out from the lieu of the building, with the vague intention of letting it soak him again, he catches sight of the ship that’s pulled in, sitting against the dock. It dwarfs the ferry that he’d taken to the Sandstone Market, three masts and the sides lined with gun ports – closed, at least, for what little that might do to ease the minds of his neighbours.

There’s a woman standing, arguing with one of the dockhands – she makes quick, irritable gestures towards their gatehouse, probably arguing that their lamp should be lit, when sailing visibility is so poor. She’d probably be right, but Jon knows that their keeper is laid out in the village hall, three beds away from Sasha, with injuries they’re unlikely to wake up from quickly. Behind her, a couple of people are striding along towards the village, carrying wares – bolts of cloth, it looks like, materials that Larkrest’s tailors might have elbowed each other out of the way to purchase, on any other day. 

Almost unconsciously, Jon starts to move towards them, pushing his hands into his pockets in search of change – they come up empty, because he’d spent the last of what he’d set aside for the market on Martin’s creature, and he yanks them out again at the sting of the memory.

“Excuse me,” he says, stepping to intercept one of them. “Did you see any other ships on your way in? Travelling away?” 

The trader skirts smartly around him, and continues on his way. Jon wheels to go after him, his face twisting, but he’s already going too fast, and clearly has no intention of stopping to talk to Jon. He waits a moment, smooths the snarl out of his features, and then keeps walking, along the dock towards the ship. On the deck, he can see other people moving – maybe he’ll have better luck with one of them.

At the top of the gangway, a woman moves to bar his path – her expression is about as open and friendly as that of the man he’d passed, and Jon braces himself to keep his temper, reminds himself that he may not be Tim, but he’s not going to get anywhere with anger.

“Excuse me,” he tries, again. “I just wanted to ask – did you see any other ships, as you were coming in?”

The woman’s eyes twitch, and Jon does what he can not to react to it – he must look like a problem, he supposes, hair streaked with soot and ruffled with stress, clothes no better.

“Is there someone else I could speak to? I really need to know–”

“Why don’t you let me handle this, Emma?” 

The speaker – a man, straight-backed and well-dressed – moves the woman out of Jon’s path with a hand on her shoulder, and she goes without protest.

“We can talk inside,” he says, and gestures for Jon to come aboard. He does so, with a hesitant glance at the woman as he passes her – she meets it with a glare, and he quickens his pace.

“That’s really not necessary,” Jon says. “I just wanted to know if–”

The man is already walking away, throws a benign smile back over his shoulder at Jon, and points for him to follow. Jon trails for an instant, wrong-footed by the abrupt difference in attitudes, before he finds his resolve again, balls his fists, and goes where he’s told.

He’s led to the back of the deck, into a tiny, weather-beaten room that contains little beyond a desk and a series of jumbled maps. The man brushes one off one of the chairs, and offers it to Jon, but he shakes his head – he’s sat for far too long already.

“I was trying to ask,” Jon says, with as much volume as he thinks is reasonable, determined not to have it just spoken over this time. “Did you see any other ships on your way in?”

The man takes the seat, and favours Jon with a glance that makes him acutely aware of everything about him that’s in disarray. He doesn’t care, he reminds himself, plants his feet a little more firmly.

“We passed a few other vessels,” he says. “Can you tell me anything more about the one you’re looking for?”

Jon hesitates. He has nothing. No details, not the number of masts or the colour or the size. He could go back and ask, perhaps, but he imagines that for the rest of Larkrest, as for him, it will just be _the_ ship, the one that had spilled fire and loss and needed no other qualifier.

Tim would know, he thinks, with a sensation like thorns at the inside of his throat. Tim remembers things about ships, can tell a sloop from a frigate, define a square rig, or judge how recently a crew has paid their tithes to the Fairchilds, but Tim’s gone.

“The school, perhaps?” the man suggests, steepling his fingers.

No one had mentioned. Too busy fearing for their lives to check for the colour of the pennant on the mainmast. Jon tries to think, but he can’t seem to marshal his thoughts past the shape that the man makes, regarding Jon with bland helpfulness, the kind that’ll be all too easily swept away if he can’t give the right answers. His heart starts to thud harder, even the names of the cults slipping away from him like mist when he tries to take hold of them.

He forces himself to breathe, pictures Tim and Martin as he’d left them that morning, bleary and bumbling around the office, Tim knocking his shoulder into Martin’s even though there was plenty of space to go around him. They need him to get this right, and he _can_.

“Stranger,” he says, finally. He’s not certain, not absolutely – his experiences with magic have been only the odd artefact and mentions in the books he’s read, rumours that swirl from time to time around the village. Probably wouldn’t even be able to name all of the thirteen schools, but the witnesses had said no faces, and that only seems typical to one that he recalls. “I think.”

“Ah,” the man says. “Yes, we did pass one of them – corvette, travelling west at some speed.”

“Are you headed that way?” Jon’s tone spikes, but he doesn’t want to try and control it again. “I need to follow it, it took my – my assistants.”

“Hm.” The man folds his hands away into his lap, and then pulls a drawer out from the desk, rummaging through it. “You’re aware, I take it, of what happens to people taken by the Stranger?”

“I’ve heard stories.” Not ones that he wants to think about – flayed corpses that had been seen frozen on mountain ledges, survivors sobbing behind stitched-on masks, people carved utterly from their loved ones’ lives so neatly that they could draw that empty space and know they should be able to recognise it. The whispers of them rise up in his head, and he shoves them away. Not them. “I’ve never seen anything myself. But if there’s a chance I have to take it. Please, Captain…”

“Bouchard.” The man pulls something from the drawer, and places it on top of the map, gestures for Jon to take it. It’s a pebble, he thinks, polished smooth by the seas and thrown up on a shore that no one has set foot on since the last epoch. “Elias.”

“Captain Bouchard,” Jon amends, and picks up the stone. It’s cold, colder than he had expected, and something in his head is revolted by it – he wants to drop it again, throw it down so hard against the floor that it might shatter. But the captain is watching him, so he closes his fingers over it instead. “I can pay. I don’t have much, or at least not much money – there might be some valuable items, if that’s something that you’re interested in, you can have whatever you want–”

“What is it that you do, Mister…?”

“Jon Sims,” Jon fills in, almost spits his own name out, hot and impatient. “I’m the curator of Larkrest’s museum.” It feels abruptly awkward to describe it that way, as if the captain is about to head down the gangway to inspect the place and find it wanting, probably used to grand themed collections with pages and pages of research and not what Tim had once described as _a cabinet of curiosities, but with far less efficient use of storage_ , and then given Jon an easy smile that had stolen any impulse to snap at him. “If you want to see a catalogue I can get you one – please, I have to find them, before something happens.”

“And what are you planning on doing if something has already happened?” the captain skewers him with a stare that Jon can’t meet – he looks down, studies the pebble instead, because there’s nowhere else to look. For an instant, he thinks that he sees a curving mark on the surface, but when he goes to run a finger over it, there’s nothing. A strand of hair, perhaps. “I don’t know exactly what stories you’ll have heard, of course, but I can assure you that the majority that are out there are quite true.”

Jon flinches, tries to cover it in leaning down to place the stone back on the desk.

“If they’re already…” he trails off, traces the crease down the centre of the map with his eyes. “Then I’ll grieve, and I’ll go home to tell… to tell who I have to.” He doesn’t even know if they have families, if there are people beyond Larkrest that he’ll have to contact. “But if there’s even a chance. I’m willing to pay whatever I can.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” The captain scoops the pebble up, returns it to his desk drawer, and then favours Jon with a smooth, broad smile. “I think you’re going to fit right in here.”


	2. Chapter 2

Martin can’t breathe. He tries – inhales, exhales, heaves the air in and out like he’s knows he’s supposed to, but it doesn’t seem to do anything except build the pressure in his chest. Too tense – when the door opens, his whole body jerks like he’s on puppet strings. He wants to _do_ something, fight or flee or _anything_ , but his head hurts and he has no weapons and all he can manage is throwing up an hand in front of his eyes, to try and keep the worst of the glare out of them.

He’s vaguely aware of Tim doing the same, though his other arm snaps out across Martin’s chest, like it’s trying to form a barrier. The effort sits oddly in Martin’s head, the instinctive speed of it, but there’s no time to think about it now. There’s more movement from the doorway, as the indistinct shape silhouetted there steps into their prison, far too close already – the room is so small that there’s nowhere in it that he could go and believe himself out of reach.

The figure resolves, into a woman. She’s dressed for flying, her clothes thick and tough, though for the moment she’s rolled up her sleeves, and her skin seems to bunch and crease in the same places as her jacket. Her face sits oddly over her skull, hanging in some places and too tight in others.

Martin struggles to quash the nausea still squirming in his breathless throat, and glances at Tim. Asks, silently, if he thinks they could manage it, if they went for her – they’re injured, but there are two of them and only one of her, and for all that she’s not quite right, _maybe_ they could knock her down long enough to flee, to find somewhere to hide. Even if all they do is try, it would feel like _something_. Like not just sitting here and letting her do whatever she wants to them.

Tim doesn’t look back, all his attention fixed on the woman. There’s no calculation in his face, though, nothing to indicate that he’s trying to answer the same question. He’d probably help, if Martin went for her, would hardly just sit there and watch him get beaten, but if they’re going to do it, they’re going to need to do it _fast_ , before she can alert her crewmates. They’ll need to do it together.

He shuffles slightly closer to Tim, hoping to catch his eye. There’s a breeze, where he moves to, a faint inrush of air through the open door. He can’t see very much beyond it – just more wooden boards, bounding a corridor – but it’s definitely larger, and the knot in his chest eases, just a little.

“Which of you is Tim Stoker?” the woman demands, and all plans for imminent escape are torn from Martin’s mind like dandelion seeds in a gale. He thinks, for a moment, that he must have misheard, but for all that her voice sits oddly in the space, seems to fall flat before its reverberations can reach very far, he knows he didn’t.

Tim finally looks to him, shares a moment of contact, and then he’s scrutinising the woman again, squinting at her expression. Martin follows his lead, but there’s no indication there of why she might be asking. He wouldn’t want to be pressed to say whether she’s experiencing anything at all in the way of emotions – if they’re something that she expresses with her features, she doesn’t do it in a fashion that Martin’s familiar with.

Tim, though. Tim’s uncertain, afraid. Confused. Martin’s sure that Tim had found the same things on his face. Even on top of everything else that’s happened, it’s not a _normal_ question. It’s not normal for there to be _any_ questions. Raids are indiscriminate, will take whoever’s unlucky enough to be within reach of the port. They don’t have names, don’t care about names, certainly don’t single any out.

It doesn’t fit with anything that Martin’s heard of before. Raids are fairly rare these days, with the last of the civil wars among the Fairchilds resolved when he’d been a child, and any other significant conflicts quashed by the sky-spanning fist of the Vast, but they still have common threads. The ones he’s heard stories of are pirates, looking to snatch supplies they have no intention of paying for, or people. On a mundane ship, it’ll be for labour. On arcane ships, worse. There have been whispers of flying abattoirs that have run out of meat to cut, of soldiers in need of comrades in half-imagined wars, of plagues that have run tendrils through the hearts of a crew and compel them to infect.

This isn’t that. This woman knows Tim’s name, wants him specifically, and Martin has no idea what it means.

“Tim Stoker,” she repeats, slower and more clearly, to the point that Martin thinks he can hear every letter of it, encompassed in its own private instant of speech. He shudders, and the movement seems to draw her to him – her head snaps down, predatory and unblinking. Under her stare, he’s all too aware of how he must look, still sweating and shivering from before. Doesn’t look brave, certainly doesn’t feel it. But he won’t talk. Will bite his tongue still if he has to.

Tim shifts closer, and sets his jaw into a kind of spiteful, bullish insolence that Martin’s never seen from him before – he’s usually so bright, easy-going, smile always a half second away from his lips. He’s caught in it, considering how it sits on Tim’s face, mapping it out, when the woman sighs. One hand snaps towards him, faster than he can recoil, and snatches a fistful of his shirt.

She yanks him up, past his feet, and his shoulder knocks hard into Tim’s as the same thing happens to him – she hauls them both forwards like they’re nothing, and drags them out into the corridor.

Tim grabs at her arm, trying to wrench it off him, but when his fingers come away they’re draped over with a stretch of loose skin, peeled away to reveal sinews underneath that knock Martin off his fledgling attempts to get his legs under him properly, something curdling in his throat. They’re wrong. He doesn’t want to look at them, can’t focus his eyes anywhere else. He’s seen animals’ insides, on the odd occasion when he’s encountered their bodies, and he’s seen people’s insides, drawn in macabre detail over the pages of some of Jon’s books, and these look like the latter. Like they’ve been painted on, against another, unyielding surface.

“Do that again,” the woman growls, and it thuds against Martin’s skull, sharpens the shards of his headache until it’s all he can feel. “And I don’t care who you are, who wants what with you. I’ll take a replacement off your back, understand?” 

Tim spits at her, and she backhands him – by the time that Martin realises that she’d let go of him to do so, she’s got a new grip, and Tim is glaring up at her with blood bubbling at his lip. He laughs, and it flecks against his teeth, savage and strange.

She drags them on, up a narrow flight of steps with no regard for whether or not they’re moving with her. At the top, she throws them down, and Martin lands hard on his back. There’s an instant with no breath, when all he sees is the sky, a sweep of white fog with light threatening to break through it somewhere overhead, casting strange shapes through the clouds. His eyes well, and he gasps air into his lungs like he’s been drowning.

“Which of you is Tim Stoker?” the woman asks again, stepping back into Martin’s field of view. She’s pulling her sleeves down now, but there’s no urgency about it, and it occurs to him that she probably doesn’t feel the cold, or maybe that she feels nothing else.

“Why do you want to know?” Tim demands, and her attention flickers over to him. Martin rolls himself over, starts to crawl away, slow and painful. They might still be able to escape her, he thinks, and it feels high-pitched even in his head. She’s strong, but if they work together maybe they could pitch her over the side.

He’s abruptly hauled sideways, a tight grip on his arm – the woman’s boots slam down where his fingers had been, with a force that he knows would have snapped them, and he scrabbles the rest of the way into Tim, lets him pull him back and away.

The woman just lets it happen. There’s nowhere they can go, after all. The ship is sailing, and their only other option is to go overboard and let the sky take them. She steps after them, aims a kick at one of Tim’s retreating legs. He snatches it out of the way, but she keeps coming, strolling after.

“You’ll tell me,” she says. “The only part that’s up to you is how many bones I have to break before I get there.”

* * *

Once all the relevant papers are signed, Captain Bouchard – _Elias_ , as he insists Jon calls him – shows him to an available cabin. It’s tiny, a kind of afterthought of interior design clustered in beside the engine room, where they must have realised that they had a few square metres spare, and put a bed in it. Under normal circumstances, Jon might ask if there are any other options – he can feel the thrum of the heart of the ship through the walls, and doesn’t imagine that sleeping there will be exactly restful – but the moment that he feels a complaint starting to form on his tongue, Tim and Martin’s faces spring to mind. He imagines without wanting to cages and chains and sobbing dark, and swallows hard.

“When do we leave?” he asks, turning back to Elias. It doesn’t matter that the window is so tiny that he shouldn’t even try to read in there without a lamp, that if he rolls over in the night he’ll end up on the floor, that the desk’s too narrow for a sheet of paper.

“You have a little time,” Elias says, mildly. “I suggest you go and collect whatever belongings you wish to bring with you.”

“Nothing,” Jon snaps, his throat itching with the need to demand to know why they’ve not already left. The process in Elias’ office had already taken long enough – by the time that he’d been led out, a couple of the traders had already been back on the deck, packing away wares ready to be stored below decks, no one in Larkrest in a state to buy. He inhales, forces his fingers out of the fists they’re trying to coil themselves into. “I don’t need anything, can’t we just–” 

“Really,” Elias interrupts, folding his own arms, though it seems carefully calculated to avoid any impression of impatience. He’s just explaining, like any captain with a new crew member who doesn’t understand. “Go back and get your things. I recommend some heavier clothes – it can get very cold out on deck.”

“I’ve been on ships before,” Jon grinds out. “I will be fine.”

“No.” Elias offers him a tight, sure smile. “Not like this one – we tend to fly rather higher than the passenger ferries you’ll be used to. Ice forms on the hull. Our ship’s doctor is very good, but it is not cost-effective for me to have him spending all his time trying to stop you losing fingers when that is entirely avoidable.”

“Then I’ll pick something up the next time we stop in port.”

“With what money?” It doesn’t feel like an insult – Jon wishes it did, that the part of him that wants to snap and snarl could at least feel justified, but Elias doesn’t raise his voice to meet Jon’s. “You will receive a wage, of course, but I would estimate that even with that it will be a short while before you can afford to purchase an adequate set of clothes.”

“I just…” Jon breathes out, deflates with it. “I want to go after Tim and Martin as soon as possible.”

“Are those their names?” The corners of Elias’ lips twitch, like his smile is trying to broaden, settling when Jon doesn’t answer. “I understand that you’re impatient – worried. Believe me, I want to help you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have accepted you onto my crew. I’m sure you are very skilled at what you do, but it is not exactly useful to the ship. We’ve brought people aboard after the Stranger had finished with them – I know only too well what might have befallen your assistants. But I think you want to make sure that the situation is handled properly. It’s an endless sky, Jon. You don’t want to risk losing them in it. We’re going to be careful, and that is going to take some time. Right now, I’ve got a few people out, talking to the witnesses, in case any of them can tell us anything further about the ship – identifying marks, for example. Go and get your things. Pick up some clothes for Tim and Martin, too – I doubt the Stranger will have afforded them the courtesy of letting them pack. We won’t leave without you. Consider it an order.”

Jon glowers, but Elias meets his glare with a level glance of his own that makes it clear that it’s not an argument that Jon is going to win.

“Fine,” he says, and brushes past Elias to stride back out into the corridor. Elias doesn’t make any effort to call after him, and he ascends back up onto the deck stewing in his own silent annoyance. He ignores the other crew members that he passes – he’s not there to make friends with them, doesn’t want to be there long enough to learn their names.

As he heads down the gangway, an itch starts up between his shoulder blades, the back of his neck prickling. He half-turns without quite knowing why, and glances up. There’s a woman, standing against the mainmast – a shipmate, from the thick clothes she’s wearing. She watches him, sharp-eyed and guarded, and turns back towards her ropes when she sees him looking.

Probably just curious, Jon tells himself, though his skin still crawls with the memory of her scrutiny. Before he makes himself walk the rest of the way back into Larkrest, he checks the top of the mast, refuses to let his pause be solely on her account. There’s the usual blue pennant, to indicate that the right tithes have been paid to Simon Fairchild, for the engine and for passage through his sky, and below it, a shorter flag in a dour green.

He can’t remember what that means, if he had ever known.

It doesn’t matter. Everyone he’d seen had looked normal enough, and besides, it’s not as if he has any other options.

His feet find the way to the museum again without him needing to concentrate on it, taking all those once-familiar turns, no longer quite as he remembers them. Some of the streets are fine, almost untouched, to the point where if it wasn’t for the dense, wild fear that’s knotted into his chest, he could believe that none of it had ever happened. Then he’ll cross some invisible line, and the next houses will be burned beyond recognition.

Probably the route that the raiders had taken to the museum, he supposes, and quickens his pace, unwilling to follow in their footsteps, hours too late.

There’s not much that he wants to bring with him. He empties out the books from one of the bags that he’d taken to the Sandstone Market, and starts to stuff clothes into it, pulls the only winter coat he has over his shoulders. Paper and pens, to write to Sasha. An old volume on the magic of the world, written by someone he sincerely doubts understood any of it, mostly superstition and prejudice. A brown, speckled feather from one of Martin’s creatures, that he’d given him to mark his page.

He wishes he had more of them. That he’d connected with them enough that it doesn’t feel quite so much like an intrusion, when he ventures into their rooms. Tries to guess what kinds of things that they might want, feels like he’s groping about in the dark. Small poetry collection for Martin, terrible romance novel for Tim. Changes of clothes for both of them, which at least feel easier, right up until he pulls Tim’s coat out of his wardrobe.

It’s pushed up towards the back, half-forgotten, thick and heavy like it was made for flying, elbows and sleeves worn smooth. Tim had been wearing it on the day Jon had met him, shrugging off a stowaway’s fine with the same charm he’d turned to the museum post. He’d expected to be there a couple of months at most, he’d cautioned Jon, before he’d accepted the job, and something haunted had crept into his expression. Whatever that had been, it had ended up folded away with the coat, and Jon had never seen either of them again.

Jon swallows a sob, and drapes it over his bag, packs everything else far too aware of it, can feel exactly the weight of it, when he leaves.

He means to head straight back to Elias’ ship, but finds himself slowing as he passes the village hall, peering through into the village hall. Sasha’s still sleeping, the doctor standing next to her bed. She’s in good hands, he reminds himself. And she’d probably only try to talk him out of it.

“Can I help you, Jon?”

Jon blinks, takes a second to focus on the speaker – he doesn’t recognise her, but there’s a deep sympathy in her expression that means that she knows all about him, knows exactly what he’s lost.

“Um,” he manages, fishing for the words. “I – I’m leaving. With Captain Bouchard. Going after Tim and Martin.” The woman opens her mouth, frowning, but Jon pushes on to interrupt her before she can try to argue with him. “Can you tell Sasha, when she wakes up? I’ll write to her. I have to do this.”

He spins on his heel, before he can properly take in her expression, and hurries away.

The ship is getting ready to leave, as he gets back – the sails are unfurled, flapping against the masts, and he rushes, stumbling his way down below decks, aware of the gangway being pulled away behind him. The noise makes something that had been frantic and clutching in his head smooth out, the boards humming beneath his feet as the engine starts to work.

As he turns the last corner to his cabin, he notices the woman from before again – she’s at the end of the corridor, this time, still watching him.

“Can I help you?” he demands, snaps it out towards her. She turns her back, strides away without a word, and Jon takes a single heated step after her.

The ship pulls away from the dock, almost throwing him against the wall, and he sways around, staggering into his room. He’ll worry about the woman later. For now, he’ll unpack his things, and let his breathing ease with the knowledge that he’s finally _doing_ something.

_I’m coming_ , he thinks, to people he knows can’t hear it, and hopes that they might anyway.

* * *

There’s nowhere left for them to go. The edge of the ship is so close that Tim keeps knocking his shoulders into the low wall that’s the only thing between them and the void, and still the woman keeps coming closer, that question a dull, familiar rhythm that Tim knows it’ll take days to get out of his head. It comes out like a recording, no rise in anger or frustration when they keep not answering, like it was never even speech of its own, just noises strung together from disconnected syllables.

He’s heard his own name enough times now that it doesn’t feel real anymore.

It’s getting harder to move out of her way. The wind chill cuts at Tim’s skin like a knife, shearing into the flesh and leaving him shaking. He’s torn his hands and arms on the deck, knows that from the sight of them, but he can’t feel it. The pain in his head is only getting worse, to the point that the woman seems to blur when she moves.

Her attacks, at least, all seem carefully calculated. She kicks at their extremities, not at their faces or their chests. Any more vital areas are only struck by her hands, open palm or vicious backhand. Tim’s been in bar brawls that had had a clearer intention to leave lasting damage – she’s trying to scare them, to get the information that she wants, is probably expecting the cold and the fear to do most of her work for her.

It probably will, eventually. Their minds will freeze like the rest of them, and one of them will let it slip, somehow. Maybe he’ll be so focussed on not answering the question, but forget not to shout out Martin’s name in warning, if he gets too close to the edge. All he can do is try to stave that off as long as possible, keep his thoughts active.

The problems that his brain has don’t last him very long. He’s not so well-versed in the mythology of their world as Jon is, but even without any colours flying, he can tell a Stranger monster when he meets one, and this woman with her ripped off skein of skin is hardly typical of anything else. As far as he’s aware, he’s never encountered anything form the sect before – but the woman had said that someone else wanted him. Has been trying not to damage them, so presumably whoever they are, they want him more or less intact.

A bounty, maybe. He doubts that he’s ever done anything to warrant anything like that – before he’d arrived in Larkrest, there had been a string of petty crimes, a lot of fines he’d talked his way out of, but it had only ever been small stuff, little things that he had to do to keep himself alive and moving. Nothing since he’d started working for Jon. He doesn’t make a habit of involving himself with the kind of people who might send monsters after him, and even the worst of his relationships had ended long enough ago that he’s sure they can’t be related. He’s never been anything special to anyone, enemy or lover.

But it’s happening, and the fact that he doesn’t know why doesn’t change that.

There are two things that he can hold onto – Martin’s arm, first, so tightly that he’s sure that it must hurt, and then the simple certainty that the woman _cannot know_. She might not want to damage Tim Stoker, but he doubts that the same applies to Martin Blackwood. He’s heard rumours about what the Stranger does to the people it takes, learnt them by rote – skin sails and puppets dangling from the rigging, incomplete creatures fashioned out of the pieces left over – and they’re not something he has any attention of abandoning Martin to.

If they can just hold their nerve, the woman will have to turn them both over to whoever wants him, and maybe then it’ll all fall to pieces, but the more time they have, the better.

He considers telling her as much, that there’s no need to go through all the trouble, but he doesn’t want to risk opening his mouth, too afraid that if he does, names will start to spill out like broken teeth, clattering against the deck.

Instead, he pulls Martin with him silently, when he tries to dart around the woman, away from the edge, but she’s faster than they are – one hand snatches for Martin’s throat, and while he manages to recoil back from her, her nails still leave long thin scratches in his skin.

“Which of you is Tim Stoker?” she asks, again – has to shout, past the first few heavy drops of a thick rain, rolling in around them. They break against Tim’s face, soaking him in seconds, freezing water trickling down the back of his shirt.

Tim judges the distance from the wall, and then shoves Martin hard away from him, tries to scramble around. She’s close enough, he’s sure, maybe he could get hold of her and tip her up and over before she can fight back, and then they can find themselves a place to hide, or maybe release the other prisoners and take the whole ship over.

As he tries to get past, he slips against the now-sodden deck, and her hand closes around his ankle, yanks his legs out from under him. She leans down, her face too close to his, and opens her mouth to call out her question again. Martin pulls at her shoulder, trying to drag her off him, but she shoves him away hard enough that he falls, too, strikes the floor with a sharp cry that Tim can barely hear.

The sky behind the woman splits, bright white carving across it, illuminating them for an instant in stark, harsh lines. Tim thinks that something in her expression falters with it, even before the thunder sounds, a low rumble that he can feel down to his bones, louder than it’s even been in Larkrest.

He manages to slither out from under her, scrabbles to his feet and hurries to pull Martin up too, knuckles aching as they slide into their old grip again. There’s another lightning-crack as he does, and Martin starts into him, as distracted by the storm as the woman is.

It’s a good time, Tim thinks. They’ll need to get below decks again, out of the weather, but if they can manage that faster than her, go before she can gather herself again, they might be in with a chance.

He starts to run, hauling Martin along beside him, heading for the still-open hatch towards the rear of the ship. His boots slip against the soaked wood, but he manages to keep them stumbling in the right direction, until something hits the side of the ship, shakes it with a noise louder than the thunderclap, and his legs go out from under him. The impact is hard enough to drive the breath out of him, makes him loose his hold on Martin’s arm – the ship’s struck again, and he tries to crawl back towards him as the deck pitches below him.

“Don’t move!” the woman snaps out, and Tim is vaguely aware of her grabbing for them again, cutting off their route down. “Unless you want to go over the side!”

Tim manages to claw his way back to Martin, digging his freezing fingers against the boards. Martin’s eyes are wide, scared, and he opens his mouth, calling something that Tim can’t hear. The gale is dragging at him, wrenching his clothes like they’re trying to haul them off his back, and he knows he should find some way of anchoring them, but he’s not sure they could even get to the mast if they tried, doesn’t have the dexterity left in his hands to bind them to it.

As it is, all he manages to do is wrap his arms around Martin, and hope that the maelstrom won’t take them. It’s all too loud, too dark, the clouds pressing low and black over the ship as the wind screams amongst the sails. It feels as if the sky itself is coming apart, tearing at the seams and hurling them down towards the earth, and it’s not something that they can defend themselves against.

He feels Martin twitch, and risks opening his eyes again – the woman is lying in front of them, on her back, face upturned. There’s a dark hole through the centre of her forehead, the rain washing blood across the deck around them, and her only movement is what the storm buffets her into. He can’t seem to focus on it, can’t understand it, and then he sees more movement at the edges of his vision, shapes at the far edge of the deck, and it starts to make sense.

“The ship’s under attack!” he shouts to Martin, huddling closer to him and trying to bundle the both of them towards the nearest mast, one shaking hand raised in a gesture of surrender. He’s sure that they don’t look like a threat, but it can’t hurt to be explicit about it. Whatever this is, he doesn’t want to fight it. It’s not the Stranger, and that can only be an improvement.

They’re ignored, at first – the other crew, scarcely visible amongst the streaks of the rain, move across the ship with confidence and purpose, pistols cracking in counterpoint to the gathering thunder, and Tim can tell that the battle’s already lost – and then another flash illuminates someone else: a man, short but apparently walking without difficulty despite the storm. Tim’s half-sure that he’s imagining it, but it looks for an instant like the lightning isn’t just around him – it’s connected with him, branches away from him in writhing patterns and fans across the whole of the sky like burning, impossible wings. 

Tim presses closer against Martin, and drops his now-trembling arm, unable to keep it raised any longer. There’s no click of a gun being primed, no shape of one entering his field of vision, though that only now includes the deck and a pair of boots. 

“Prisoners?” the man asks, and even though he doesn’t raise it, his voice is somehow perfectly audible, despite the howling of the storm, enough to drown out even Tim’s thoughts.

Tim nods, but the man doesn’t acknowledge it – someone else grabs him, rough but in a way that feels more businesslike than malicious, hauling him up from the base of the mast. He manages, just about, to snatch Martin’s hand as he’s lifted, lock their fingers together. Martin’s are as cold as his, sodden and stiff, and it wouldn’t take much to break the grip, but no one tries to.

“What do you want us to do with the ship?” The question’s yelled, somewhere at the edge of Tim’s awareness.

“Strip it of anything of value and set it on a course back to the Faceless Port,” the man orders – captain, Tim thinks, distantly, though it doesn’t feel like something that matters. He’s gone too numb. “It’s about time we reminded the Stranger what happens when they don’t pay their tithes.” He spares Tim and Martin an assessing glance through cold eyes as grey as the storm clouds around them, and them seems to dismiss them. “Remind them that the sky belongs to us.”


	3. Chapter 3

The ship shudders to a halt again within just a couple of hours. Jon feels it, pauses in the middle of trying to stow the things that he’d brought for Tim and Martin safe within the meagre storage that his room offers. He lets out a long, harsh breath, considers marching straight to Elias’ office and demanding to know why they’ve stopped again so soon. He can almost _see_ the future where he does it, knows from the ache in his throat how it will sound. But he’s sure he’s imposed on the captain’s patience enough already. Been lucky not to already have been struck from his rescue mission, after the way he’d spoken to him before, and while Elias does seem to be understanding enough about the whole thing, that will have its limits.

And besides, the idea of leaving his assistants’ things out is more of an uncomfortable itch than anything else. His door has a lock, and he has the key, but he still wants to flinch at the thought of them being exposed. So he forces himself to settle again, keeps adjusting and readjusting Martin’s coat in the cupboard until he realises that he’s not moving it anymore, just leaning close to it and inhaling that faint familiar scent.

Then he backs out, wipes the back of one hand across his eyes, and sits for a while on the end of the bed. It’s uncomfortable, but not in a way that it shouldn’t be, and he knows that that isn’t going to be the thing that keeps him from sleeping, when it comes to it. He stays there, empty-headed, staring, until his eyes catch on the sheaf of paper sticking out of his bag, and he remembers that he owes Sasha better than some wild-eyed second-hand explanation from someone he couldn’t name.

There’s not quite enough space on the desk to write properly, and without a chair it feels more like a shelf than anything else, but Jon hunches, leans over and lets the paper bend up against the wall.

_Dear Sasha_ , he writes.

_I’m sorry to have left without telling you. I would have waited to explain things properly, but as I’m sure you’ll understand, I wanted to go after Tim and Martin as soon as possible. I’ve signed on as a crew member on Captain Elias Bouchard’s ship, and he’s helping me. It’s too early to say how it’s going at this point, but the accommodations could be worse. They’ve not made me share a room, at least – I’m sure you remember how poorly that goes._

_I hope this letter finds you recovering, and that I haven’t left you with too much of a mess at the museum. If you must, consider this permission to be rid of the lot of it, though if you could try to care for Martin’s creatures as long as possible, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it when he gets back._

_I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. As long as I have to. I’m going to find them, Sasha. I won’t be back without them._

_All best, Jon_. 

He feels no better for having written it. The resolve and surety that he forces out through his pen has no mirror in his head, and when he considers trying to go ashore and send it, he’s reluctant. There should be more to tell her, some single solitary speck of progress to give her, to prove that he’s not just run off on some fool’s errand because he can’t stand the loss. Sasha’s smart enough, knows him well enough, that she’ll see through whatever wavering promises he manages to set in ink, and for all that he knows in his head that she cares about the others enough to support him anyway, in his chest he’s painfully, pathetically glad that the letters can only ever go one way.

When the knock at his door comes, he’s been staring at that last line for so long that he no longer finds it legible. It takes a second for him to recognise the noise for what it is, and then he folds the paper over, makes a half-hearted attempt to straighten his clothes, and goes to answer.

It’s Elias, an impeccable contrast to Jon’s crumpled and soot-stained self. He’s carrying a lantern, and dressed like he’s been out, coat buttoned all the way and cuffs carefully folded.

“Jon,” he says, and offers the lantern, with a polite smile. “I hope you’re settling in well?”

“About as well as can be expected.” Jon takes the lantern, and busies himself hooking it to the loop in the ceiling, tries to hide any annoyance in the action. “Why have we stopped?”

“Hm.” Elias steps inside, and pushes the door closed behind him. “Straight to business, then. As I told you before, if we’re to find your assistants, we’ll need to be as careful as possible. Until we have sight of the ship, it could at any time change its course, and we would have no idea. This is the next town in the direction it was travelling, and I thought it prudent to stop and check whether anyone here had seen it.”

“Had they?” The question comes out breathless, the words running into each other, losing coherency.

“I’m afraid not.” Elias thins his lips, expression tightening. “It’s possible that it’s just the weather, and that it did continue in this direction anyway, but it’s impossible to know for sure.”

Jon sits again, heavily enough that the pillow at the other end of the bed bounces, just slightly.

“What do we do, then?” he asks, muffling it into his hands as he brings them up to hold the weight of his face. “Is that it?”

Elias moves a little closer, the boards sighing under his feet, and for a moment Jon thinks that he’s going to try to perch next to him, comfort him. His mind recoils from the possibility, and he tenses, ready to stand again, but Elias just stops, and though Jon can feel him looking, he moves no nearer.

“Not quite,” he says. “We have three options. The first is to carry on this way, and hope that we catch sight of them. The second would be to travel for the Faceless Port, and hope that we encounter this particular ship on the way. Unfortunately, while most Stranger vessels will make their way back there eventually, there’s no guarantee that the one we’re looking for will be returning to it soon, and I fear that your assistants may not have that long.”

They both sound to Jon like they’re strategies entirely founded on _hope_. It’s not enough. Not for him to tell Sasha about, not to believe in himself.

“And the third option?” he asks.

“It’s not something I would usually suggest,” Elias tells him, and then pauses again, as if he’s having to convince himself. “But I hate to disappoint you so completely this early. There is something else that we could try, to gather more information.”

“Spit it out,” Jon snaps, letting his hands fall away, forcing his head up to glare.

“As you may have noticed,” Elias says, still too slow, so reluctant that Jon might question why he’d brought it up in the first place, if he weren’t so desperate to hear it. “We are… not a mundane ship. I am sure you have heard all manner of stories which do the magic that exists in our world no favours, and in the majority of cases I would even agree that they are warranted. It’s not something to play with, and given the chance it will only too willingly subsume an entire ship. But it is possible to use it without becoming its creature.”

“What of it?” Jon’s voice stays flat, uninterested in excuses and explanations so far removed from the problem at hand. He’s read a lot about the cults, knows that there are degrees of them, that there is a difference between the Fairchilds, who construct the engines and ships that keep their world together, and those who have fallen so in thrall to the Vast that they will never find port again. He’s also read that the line between the two is far too easily crossed, that those looking to wrest an edge out of the world will find themselves changed and belonging before they could ever be satisfied with the power they have. 

“I have some measure of experience with the Eye,” Elias says. “It deals in knowledge, and that is exactly what we’re lacking here. There is something that I can try, but I will need your assistant with it. This evening, perhaps?”

“I don’t know–”

“Oh.” Elias presses his mouth closed for a second, takes a step back towards the door, though he keeps his face turns towards Jon. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have suggested it, I understand there is a lot of stigma around the whole thing, but you did seem so desperate to find your friends…”

“I am.” Jon pushes himself back up onto his feet, goes to hold out a hand to stop Elias from leaving, and has to force it back down. He can hear the pitch of his voice changing, breath catching in his throat. “I am, I just…”

“Not that desperate,” Elias concludes. “Well. Forget I mentioned it. Perhaps we’ll have some luck in the next town over, especially if the weather clears.”

“I’ll do it!” It springs from Jon’s lips, too loud, too desperate, but there’s no point in trying to keep Elias from seeing that now. He’s sure it had been clear enough even before he’d come on board. “Whatever it is. This evening, you said?”

“Yes,” Elias says, and rights himself from that almost-imperceptible lean towards the door. “My cabin. Towards the aft side of the gun deck, the only living quarters there. We’ll see if we can’t get something to go on.”

“Fine,” Jon says, and it’s a struggle not to grind it out. He’s not so oblivious that he can’t tell that he’s just been manipulated, and it rankles, for all that he knows they don’t have time for him to be indecisive about this.

“I’ll see you, then.” Elias gives a brief wave, then heads for the door. As he opens it, he pauses, glances back over his shoulder. “And I’ll look into getting you a chair.”

“I’d appreciate it.” Jon goes to see him off, but as Elias leaves, he catches a flash of movement from the other end of the corridor. He steps out, squinting into the darkness, and recognises a figure, standing pressed in the doorway to the engine room, trying to keep out of sight. They shift as he moves closer, must realise that he’s spotted them, but there’s no attempt to flee.

The woman, he remembers, once his eyes have adjusted enough to pick out features. She doesn’t seem worried about him, craning her neck to look past him as if to make sure that Elias is out of eyeshot.

“What do you want?” Jon demands, striding close enough that she _has_ to acknowledge him, _has_ to acknowledge him. His tone spikes, anger burning under his skin - she’s been _watching_ him, scrutinising his loss, and he refuses to let her anymore.

She meets his eyes with a steady, flinty stare of her own.

“He won’t get them back,” she says, in a voice to match it. “You’ll never see them again.”

“What do you–”

She’s gone before he can finish the question, shouldering past him with no discernible effort, and striding away, off in the same direction that Elias had taken. Maybe she’s not interested in Jon after all, just following him, and he considers shouting after her, loud enough to alert both her and the captain, but his voice doesn’t come when he tries for it.

Instead, he goes back into his cabin, slams the door hard behind him, and pulls the bolt across. The woman doesn’t know anything, he tells himself, pacing around the space and reassuring himself with every footfall. He’ll find them, they’ll be okay, they’ll all go home together and pretend they forget that all this ever happened. 

All he has to do is keep going.

* * *

The storm clears faster than it should. Martin’s glad of that, he supposes – he’s still freezing, his shivering synchronised with Tim’s, where they’re still pressed together, but at least their clothes might have a chance to dry now – but he knows it’s not right. The sky had been too dark, too immense, for it to already be fading to white again and feel natural. He tells himself that they probably just pass faster on ship, but he still doesn’t quite believe it, though his head is aching too hard to try to puzzle out why.

He watches, as the other crew carries things off the deck with practiced ease. Chests, crates, bottles, all of it gets carted over the side, and he can’t comprehend anything else. It’s all been too much, all at once, and it’s easier to follow the movement of the goods than it is to keep staring at the woman who’d been holding them. She’s still, now, even in the breeze that tugs at Martin’s hair, but he can feel the places where she’d struck him, bruises slowly gathering, and can’t seem to reconcile it.

Eventually, the ferrying stops. He doesn’t notice until the captain steps back into his field of vision, carrying with him the smell of wind and ozone, enough to prickle the skin at the back of Martin’s neck, pull him back to himself.

“You two, now,” he says, and gestures for them to go ahead of him.

Martin eyes the distance, and he can feel his limbs threatening to seize up just at the sight of it. It’s a narrow plank, stretched between the two vessels, and while they mostly hold steady with each other, every movement they make that isn’t exactly matched shifts it. He wouldn’t even need to put a foot wrong to be pitched over, just for another gust of wind to strike, and then he’d be falling, down through the cloud and out of sight.

There isn’t any other choice. The captain hasn’t threatened them, doesn’t seem to be holding any kind of weapon, but he doesn’t walk like he needs to. Martin doubts that if they refuse, they’ll be given a pat on the back and free rein to take the Stranger ship back to Larkrest.

Tim tugs him gently into motion, and runs his thumb briefly over Martin’s knuckles – he’s not sure what he’s supposed to take from it, reassurance or just a reminder of his presence, but however it’s meant, he feels it as something gentle across his frayed nerves, and manages to steady his breathing a little.

That lasts until he gives Martin a wintry smile, and pulls his hand away. Martin wants to snatch after it, but his fingers close on air, and Tim’s already pushing himself up onto the plank, until he’s crouched on the end.

“See you on the other side,” he says, over his shoulder, and then he stands. He windmills his arms for a moment, gathering his balance, and then he straightens his spine, and steps out as if he’s been doing it all his life. Maybe it is something that he’s familiar with – Martin doesn’t know a lot about what Tim had done before he’d come to the museum, but he knows more about ships than any of the rest of them.

Tim goes, and Martin keeps his eyes fixed on him, like he can keep him from falling with the power of that alone. It seems to take longer than it should – Tim’s still careful, but he’s not lingering, doesn’t stop to wait in the middle of the void, but Martin’s so hyperaware of how he’s moving that it seems to slow everything else down.

On top of that, he’s aware of the captain’s presence close behind him, so near that Martin could almost swear he can feel a faint crackling between them. He doesn’t look, not until Tim jumps down on the other side, and turns to give Martin a wave that’s probably far brighter than he feels.

“Afraid of heights?” the captain asks, and Martin thinks he can see something like a flicker of interest in his expression.

“No,” Martin says, but his voice is faint, as shaky as the rest of him. “No, heights have always been… okay. It’s just been a bit of a day, and I’m… _concerned_ about the possibility of plummeting to my death, which I wouldn’t say is _unreasonable_ , given the circumstances.”

“Hm.” The captain’s face twitches, and Martin thinks that he can see something there still, that could be amusement or irritation or something somewhere between. “On you go, then.”

No attempt at reassurance. Martin sighs in the deepest breath he can, and reminds himself that at least the Vast crew hasn’t hurt them yet, doesn’t seem to have some mysterious but undoubtedly awful purpose in mind for Tim. It’s _better_ , and all he has to do is get there is walk a couple of metres.

He rests his hands on the edge of the plank. It’ll be easy, he tells himself, to push down and climb up. The wood hums with the wind, and he tries to convince the shrinking thing in his mind that once he gets up there, so will he.

Perhaps he should crawl. Stay on his hands and knees, try to stay low and stable. He peers over, considering, and the drop swims at the edges of his vision, white-out below eddying with the breeze. The dizziness starts just looking at it, and he knows he’ll fall if he looks at it too long.

Better to look at Tim, he decides, finds him, on the other side. Waiting. He gives Martin an encouraging nod, and doesn’t appear to notice that there’s at least one gun pointed at him.

Martin climbs. It’s awkward. His knees seem cumbersome in ways that they never have before, knocking into his arms and almost sending him toppling back to the deck, but he manages to stand. Wobbles, dangerously, and then manages to right himself.

Just going to Tim, he reminds himself, and tries to take a step as he would across the floor of the museum. Pretend that he’s somewhere else, somewhere flat and inside and safe, but then the wind gives a rough drag at his clothes, and the next is more of a stumble than anything else. A frantic moment, uncalculated, that he feels in his throat.

“Martin!”

Tim’s voice. He’s louder than the wind, familiar and steady, and he holds out a hand to Martin like he’s asking him to dance, a borrowed second from the odd celebration in the village. He’d always gone to him then, doubtful but knowing for certain that Tim wasn’t trying to poke fun, and he can now, never mind that those two steps feel like they’ve taken three years. 

He walks. Faster now, the breeze cold against his skin but not threatening, not yet. Loses track of distance, of everything, until Tim’s hand grasps his, and helps him down, using his momentum to sweep him into a hug. Where Tim’s cheek presses against his, he can feel the edge of a relieved grin, almost warm.

“Move.”

They break apart, only far enough that they’re both able to turn towards the speaker – a woman, wearing practical leathers and a sour expression. Tim keeps an arm around Martin, shuffles them in the direction that she indicates with her gun.

“Why are you alive?” she demands, sharp and pointed.

“I don’t…” Tim hesitates, casts a glance at Martin, but there’s no help that he can offer, except to keep upright, even though his legs are starting to feel weak, like the bones are going soft.

“We found other captives from your village,” the woman says. “Dead. The Stranger tends not to keep people long, not after raids. The tanning process takes time. So, if you’re not for that, why are you alive?”

“We don’t know,” Tim tells her, and that insolence is back, lacing through his every word. Martin wonders at it, if it’s new or if it’s always been there, and Tim just hasn’t shown it to him. “They didn’t exactly explain any of it to us.”

The woman’s eyes narrow, but she just shrugs, and gestures for them to keep walking.

“Captain says we’ll probably be trading you back to the Stranger anyway,” she says. “So I imagine you’ll find out. It just would’ve been nice to know what kind of price we should ask.”

“Sorry we couldn’t help you,” Tim says, but this time she doesn’t seem to take against it. Nothing personal for her, Martin supposes. They’re just spoils, like the other stuff that they’d taken from the Stranger ship. Valuables, to be sold and traded.

“There’ll be people looking for us,” Martin tries, but he can’t put any force in it. It’s probably not true. Sasha and Jon will want to know where they are, but for them the world beyond Larkrest is measured in leisurely ferry trips, not warships tearing chunks out of each other above the clouds. He likes the thought of them looking, that they’d care enough to wonder – he knows he would – but in terms of things they could actually do, the list is short and fruitless.

“Unless you think they’d be able to pay us better than the Stranger, I don’t think that matters,” the woman says.

Martin winces. They live off the generosity of people who find curious the same things that they do, and he loves what he does, but it’s not exactly lucrative. He’s not sure there’s much money in what the Stranger does, either, but they’re a power in the world. A favour from them is _something_. Jon could offer a house of half-forgotten things and an attic full of monsters, and no one would care for it but them.

“Well then,” the woman says, taking Martin’s silence as the answer it is. She prods them down below decks, and as she does so, Martin finds himself glancing up. He doesn’t know quite why, if he’s trying to keep better track of the ladder down, if he just wants one last breath of fresh air, but as he does so, he can make out, just past the distant top of the mainmast, a broad stripe of blue across the sky.

* * *

Elias doesn’t keep Jon waiting. He goes over immediately after he finishes his evening meal, which he eats alone in his cabin, eschewing the loud and raucous company of the mess – he should probably get to know his crewmates, he thinks, but he doesn’t act on it – and he’s expecting that the captain will be busy, eating food of his own, but Elias opens the door almost before Jon’s finished knocking at it. Moves away to let him further in, each step tightly controlled, excited but trying not to show it.

The room isn’t what Jon had expected. His concept of what a captain’s cabin should be like is grander, all gilt and expense. Elias’ doesn’t look unlike the records room back at the museum, bureaus and cabinets against every wall that’ll have them. There’s a narrow bed that’s wedged into the far corner as if its only purpose is to gather dust, but it’s dwarfed by the desk that’s the focal point of the space. It’s finely polished, ornately carved at the edges and legs, and the top swirls with patterns that almost seem to glow. It’s clear save for an inlaid wooden box, left neatly in the centre.

“Come in,” Elias says, gesturing. He’s the most animated that Jon has ever seen him, a peculiar light in his face, and Jon can’t help but remember what he’d said before, about how magic subsumes, and feel the idea that he’s already gone too far creeping through the edges of his mind. He banishes it, and does as he’s told. “Sit down.”

Jon does as he’s told. The chair on his side of the desk is uncomfortable. The armrests are slightly too far apart for him to place his elbows on without feeling like the rest of him is dangling exposed in the middle, and when he tries to bring them in, he feels too small, hunched in on himself. What had looked like some attempt at cushioning now seems to be nothing more than a thin film of cloth over the frame, affording no comfort and smirking at the idea that it should.

Behind him, the door clicks closed, and a key turns in a lock. He tries to stifle a wince, but must fail, from the way that Elias briefly places a hand on his shoulder as he passes.

“Can’t be too careful.”

He takes the chair opposite, and lounges in it, offers Jon a smile that he can’t respond to in kind.

“I hope you had a pleasant meal,” he says. “I understand the food and accommodation probably isn’t at the standard you’re used to, but it’s all we have to spare.”

“It’s fine,” Jon tells him, struggles not to bite his lip when it feels like he’s slipping over onto the wrong side of curt. It’s not fine, really. The food sits in his stomach like a poorly constructed cairn, but that’s probably not solely its fault. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just get on with this.”

“Of course.” Elias steeples his fingers, considering Jon over the top of them. The scrutiny itches, seems to last far longer than it does – half-formed interruptions start to try to form themselves in his throat, but before he can convince one out, Elias is moving again. He reaches out, and carefully lifts the lid from the box. The inlay shimmers as its angle changes, and at the centre of its gleaming web, Jon can make out the shape of an eye. “How much do you know about magic?”

“Not a lot.” Jon shifts, trying not to crane to see what’s in the box, what Elias is doing. “Only what I’ve read, or heard. There are thirteen different… schools. They were discovered a long time ago, before the skybound age. People tried to use them for personal gain, but would always be warped into existing only for the ends of the magic itself.”

“Hm.” Elias glances down, into the box. Nothing seems to show in his face, no irritation or anything to indicate that he has an opinion at all on what Jon has said. “Fourteen, actually. But the Buried can largely no longer reach us. In theory there could be an infinite number, or perhaps only one – it’s debated, but I don’t tend to find such academic approaches useful. Do you know what magic actually _is_?”

“It’s a force beyond our understanding that cannot be seen or measured, and it allows the people who use it to achieve impossible things.”

“I suppose that works,” Elias says. He takes something from the box, and places it on the desk, as close to Jon as he can reach. It’s a small polished stone, that Jon thinks might be made of some kind of quartz, jagged, pale patterns just about visible on the inside. A stylised eye has been carved into one side, then filled in with black pigment. “It will of course feel somewhat different for each school. That should help you to… conceptualise.”

Jon picks it up – it’s far too cold to touch, as if it’s been left out on deck overnight, but he manages not to drop it.

“Right,” Elias says. “What we’re going to be doing here is attempting to get a _sense_ of your assistants. I will be using your memories of them as a thread. If you have an aptitude for the magic, you may also experience this sense of them. As we go on, it will progress to tapping into their senses. It’s our hope that they will see something that will enable us to properly pinpoint their location.” He withdraws his hand from the box, and then settles the lid down again – between his fingers, Jon can just about make out a flash of the same stone that he’s holding.

“How are these for _conceptualising_?” he asks.

“All beginners need a focus.” Elias settles back, and rubs a thumb across his stone. “As you progress, it will no longer be necessary, but I understand it can otherwise be difficult to open yourself to the possibilities. It doesn’t have to be stones – I do have a number of other items that we could try – but given that the first thing we are trying to do is establish a bond between us, they seemed the logical place to start.” He offers Jon a smile that puts far too much effort into being thin. “I am afraid that they won’t be sufficient on their own, at this point. I will need you to share some things with me that you may not be comfortable giving, but rest assured that the only purpose is to find your friends.”

“Just tell me what you need me to do,” Jon tells him, too dull, and closes his fingers over the stone. It’s grown no warmer. He doesn’t need to _understand_ , he reminds himself. It doesn’t have to make sense to him. The only thing that matters is that it helps the others.

“I need you to sit back, relax, and think about your friends,” Elias says, simply. “You should talk aloud about them, too. I would advise choosing a particular memory that is important to you. In order to obtain detail, I need to _know_ them, and you need to help me with that.”

“Oh.” Jon hesitates, trying to sift through his head, pick out a single memory when it abruptly feels as if none exist at all. “Do you want me to start now…?”

“I was under the impression that you were keen to be underway as soon as possible,” Elias comments, and somehow manages not to push any judgement into it.

Jon sighs. He tries to lean back in his chair, but the back of it digs into his spine, unyielding and apparently crafted with no effort to concede to the fact that someone may one day need to sit. Elias’ surely can’t be like that, he thinks, but pushes his eyes closed, instead of trying to use them to check. Lets his thoughts go to Tim and Martin, the same place that they’ve been falling towards ever since he’d returned to Larkrest.

The first thing that he feels is a bolt of panic, forcing the edges of his chest in and siphoning the air from his lungs. He should be doing more, should have left faster, should have taken better care of them in the first place. He remembers the day he’d met them. Martin, all uncertain smile and frayed clothes. Tim, wind-bitten and clearly trying to leave something behind. Both hired, for all that they hadn’t seemed nearly as suited to their post as Sasha, because he hadn’t wanted to drag himself through any more interviews. 

He should have done better. Maybe if he had, they might not be gone.

“Perhaps something a little less… fraught,” Elias suggests, from somewhere far-off.

Jon grits his teeth. He doesn’t know how he can expect something _less fraught_. They’re gone, taken, might be dead already. Every thought he’s ever had of them is tangled up in that, now, absence poking into pleasant memories like thorns.

“A few months ago,” he tries – his voice is quiet, a thin ache winding through the words. “Maybe almost a year. Martin… I get him creatures, when I can, because he’s not always as careful with the artefacts as I’d like. The kinds of things that are born when there’s too much magic. They sell them at the markets I go to for books, sometimes. He likes animals, even ones that no one else does. I’m not sure how it happened, exactly, maybe he wasn’t closing the window properly, but this cat came in, because of the food. Had kittens under Tim’s bed. It seemed like we were never going to get any work done ever again.”

He’d wanted to be annoyed, to insist that the animals go elsewhere, but he had always rather liked cats, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t keep Martin busy. Tim too, although his particular form of business hadn’t been hugely productive, from what Jon had seen. There had been one evening in their living room that he’d spent sitting sprawled out on the far side of the hearth with the mother cat asleep in his lap, gazing at Martin as he’d gently detached one mewling kitten after another from his jumper.

There’s more of the memory than Jon had thought there would be. More detail, more time. He knows what colour each of the kittens had been, remembers how they’d walked, still finding their legs and stubby tails sticking straight up. Tim had watched Martin soft-eyed and gentle-smiling, with that expression that it had always rankled Jon to see him turn on anyone else, and it had felt as warm as the firelight.

He must have been watching, too, and he wonders with a dry feeling in his throat that might once have met a sob, if Sasha had been the only person to actually get any work done that day.

At some point, he must have stopped narrating. He knows only because when Elias speaks again, it cuts into silence.

“Good,” he says, and there’s the slightest of strains to it, almost imperceptible. “That’s probably enough for tonight – I know it probably doesn’t feel like much, but if we rush these things we could do you a lot of damage. I can tell that they’re alive.”

Jon smiles. Shaky, throat catching when he tries to draw in air. It’s one word, barely anything, but he can scarcely comprehend the enormity of it. Something that had been drawing closer and closer around his ribs ever since he’d smelled smoke on the ferry relaxes, just enough to let him breathe.

He has to flee the cabin, so that Elias won’t see him crying.


	4. Chapter 4

It feels like they might as well not have moved at all. It makes sense, Tim supposes, that the space they end up in on the Vast ship is near-identical to where they’d been trapped in on the Stranger one, aside from minor differences in the angle of the wall, reflecting the size disparity between a corvette and a frigate. All legally constructed ships are built at the Painted Mountain along fairly similar lines by Simon Fairchild’s wrights, after all. There are rare vessels, made from scrap and the stolen engines of the scuttled, but those tend to be entirely mundane constructions, and are easily wrecked by Fairchild’s navy.

It’s something that he’d explain to Martin, except that he doubts it would help, as happy as he normally is to listen to Tim talk. The problem is not with the layout, with understanding – it’s that it’s too small, and no amount of rambling about the mast setup is going to change that.

Since the woman that Tim had assumed from her bearing was the first mate had shut them in, Martin’s shivering has only grown more violent, breath stealing away. Tim tries to distract him as best he can – asks him to check his back, though he can feel himself that there’s nothing life-threatening going on there. To his credit, Martin tries – lifts Tim’s shirt, gently prods all the places where the Stranger monster’s boot had connected – but Tim only has so much skin to scrutinise, and he can feel the trembling in Martin’s hands worsening even without seeing it.

“I – I don’t think anything’s broken?” Martin concludes, finally, and drops the material. It falls down against Tim’s back with a soft slap, and for a moment he can feel on his tongue the impulse to say that they should strip off their wet things, huddle to try and get warm. But it’s too close to how he’d woken up, too likely that Martin would just numbly do as he was told.

“Good.” Tim shuffles back around, and considers Martin, trying to make out detail in his face despite the half-light. “What about you? She got you a couple of times.”

“I think I’m okay,” Martin says, but his voice is hoarse, his attention wandering, circling around the room as if he’s searching for something, finding only the narrow walls. He chews at his lip, teeth digging a little too hard.

“I should check anyway,” Tim tells him, louder than he needs to. He reaches for the hem of Martin’s jumper, pauses. “If that’s all right?”

“Sure,” Martin says, half-vacant. He hardly responds when Tim skims a hand over his ribs, which he hopes at least means there’s nothing more there than the bruises he can just about see. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the movement of his chest, except that it’s too fast, too shallow.

Tim’s gaze flickers up again, and squashes the momentary need to just lean the last inch or two and kiss him. He’d be gentle, try to soothe Martin back to himself with hands and lips, but it’s a terrible, _terrible_ idea even at the best of times, which this decidedly isn’t.

Instead, he just risks a light touch of Martin’s jaw, to get his attention, and then moves back, not quite out of his space, but as far as he’s willing to go.

“Hey,” he says. “We’re going to be okay.” It’s hardly the truth, but he musters as much smooth surety into it as he can.

“Are we?” Martin coughs out something stuck in that alarming place between a laugh and a sob. “You heard what she said, Tim – they’re just going to trade us off to the Stranger, and then whatever was going to happen there is… going to anyway.”

“Maybe,” Tim concedes – he takes Martin’s hand, squeezes it, trying whatever he can to keep him grounded. “But it’s not happening _now_. No one’s trying to hurt us here yet. We’ve got more time. We might be able to get away – please, stay with me.”

“I’m sorry.” Martin meets his eyes, wretched and miserable, his fingers tightening on Tim’s until it’s almost painful. “I’m sorry, I can’t seem to stop–”

The door crashes open, so hard that it drowns out the end of Martin’s sentence, the one forming in Tim’s mouth where he assures Martin that he has nothing to apologise for, everything. Tim raises his head, too weary to try to take some kind of defensive posture, half-aware of Martin slumping into his shoulder, breathing in the faint airflow.

“Do you mind?” the captain asks, gesturing from the threshold with his chin. He’s holding three tin cups awkwardly between his hands, and must have kicked his way through. 

“We can hardly stop you,” Tim snaps. He shifts his hold on Martin to an awkward, almost-cradling arm across his back, hopes that that’ll be more easily released if he has to. Not that it’d do any good – this man is dangerous. Tim and Martin aren’t. They all know it.

“No,” the captain agrees, with a pale smile that seems half imitation and half ice. “But being polite doesn’t cost anything, does it?”

“In that case, be our guest.”

He steps inside, with a vague nod that could be a response but could equally be him ducking under a cobweb Tim can’t make out, for all that he seems to engage.

“I made you some tea,” he says, and proffers one of the cups.

“Why would you do that?” Tim demands, but before the words have even left his mouth Martin is reaching out, taking the drink and dragging in a long sip. He glares, but Martin doesn’t see it, and doesn’t seem to waver any more than he already is – gets a little steadier, if anything.

When the captain offers the second cup, Tim takes it, and risks it himself. It’s brewed a little weak for his tastes, but it does at least taste of tea. _Only_ of tea, though Tim imagines there are plenty of utterly imperceptible poisons or drugs that could be used.

“Harriet tells me that you don’t know what the Stranger wanted with you,” the captain says, and the way it comes out, it sounds like nothing more than a simple statement, no leading pressure to get them to answer.

“Harriet?” Tim pauses, connects the name with the first mate. “She’d be right. Afraid we can’t give you a better idea of what we might be worth to them.”

“It’s all the same to me,” the captain says, with a shrug and a sip of his own tea. “Harriet can be a little too caught up in politics, sometimes. We have the sky. Everything else is just pocket change.” He settles leaning against the opposite wall, leaves the door wide open in front of them. Tim considers it, wonders if there’s any point in trying to run. Looks to Martin, and just finds him staring down into his drink, no indication of whether or not he might feel up to it.

There’s probably nowhere for them to go, anyway.

“I’m Michael Crew, by the way,” the captain adds, almost idly. “Mike.”

“Right.” Tim doesn’t offer his own name in response – for all that there’s nothing in Mike’s face to indicate that it had been any sort of trick, if the Stranger ship had wanted a bounty there’s no reason why the Vast ship wouldn’t want to cash that in, too. Not safe.

Mike notices the absence, but his only reaction is to offer a smile, remote but not apparently hostile. He shifts, slightly, and the light from the doorway catches details of him that Tim hadn’t noticed before – the scar, a curling tracery of pathways that runs up his jaw, down his neck and vanishes under his shirt, appearing again at his hands, where he holds his cup. Tim’s seen lines in that pattern before, shapes on cuts of polished wood that had found their way into Jon’s museum. Lightning.

Striking, Tim thinks, and stifles away a faint laugh that tries to bubble up from the bottom of his lungs.

“Is he all right?” Mike asks, and gestures at Martin. Maybe it’s Martin’s pallor, how he’s leaning into Tim to keep upright, or the way that he’s not been participating in the conversation. Whatever the reason, Tim shuffles slightly, defensive.

“Doesn’t like cramped spaces,” Tim admits. The words taste bitter in his mouth, feel like something he shouldn’t have said, but it’s not as if Mike wouldn’t be able to guess, or like they have anything to lose by the admission.

“Hm.” Mike downs the last of his tea, and leans down to place the cup on the floor. “We’d better get him out on deck, then, hadn’t we?”

Tim frowns, but Mike makes no effort to explain, just straightens up again and offers Martin a hand. Martin doesn’t take it, but Tim still almost splashes tea over himself setting his own drink away, in a hurry to help Martin up before the captain can. Mike doesn’t comment, just steps out of the door, holds it aside for them, even though it probably wouldn’t have swung shut anyway.

Martin gets a little steadier with every step they take away from the room – by the time they reach the deck, the shaking’s gone out of him completely, and he’s walking without leaning on Tim, though he doesn’t pull away when Tim catches his hand again, interlaces their fingers. Stay close, Tim tells him with the contact, isn’t sure he’s understood.

The ship is long past the fog or the storms. Tim stops, so close to the hatch that he’s in Mike’s way, staring. The sun is out, splaying a slight warmth across Tim’s back that can’t entirely cut through the chill of the breeze. Across to either side, Tim can see the shapes of mountains, rugged peaks and distant snow, but the space they fly through is an immense valley – when Martin lets out a soft breath, pulls Tim towards the railing to see over, he can make out deep greens and browns, an impossible distance below.

“Tim,” Martin whispers, points down and across towards a group of circling birds that Tim thinks might be vultures, broad-winged and soaring, but far larger than any that he’d seen before.

“I take it you’ve not been up this high before?” Mike asks – Tim has to wrench his gaze away from the landscape, sees that he’s stopped a respectful distance away, but still watches them.

“No,” Martin says, and his voice is stronger than Tim’s heard it in a while, like the knots that the day has tied in his throat have been unravelled. Tim’s own shoulders relax at the sound of it, and he draws in a deep lungful of air, letting the tension in his limbs ease. “It’s beautiful.”

“Well, enjoy it,” Mike tells them, and the smile on his face actually seems to reach his eyes, makes them seem dawn-pale rather than stormy. “It’s not the kind of thing you forget. I’ll look into finding you somewhere more spacious to stay.”

He backs away from them, leaves Tim to lean up on the rail of the ship next to Martin, let the wind tug the last of the rain out of their clothes. It’s cold, still, but not as much as it could be, and with Martin pressed up against his side, he can accept it as pleasant.

Martin points out another cluster of birds, this one a travelling arrow of geese, their raucous calls just about audible, and the utter relief in his expression is enough to make Tim push all his suspicions about how nice the captain’s being to the back of his mind, let himself pretend that he can’t see them just a little while longer. Martin’s feeling better. They have more time.

And it’s not as if they have anywhere else to go. 

* * *

There is no summoning. No bell, no call or passing whisper that pulls them all on deck. They find their way there anyway – Jon heads up from his cabin without quite knowing why, remembers his way through the corridors with the vague and half-thought assumption that he’d just wanted some air.

The rest of the crew is already assembled, standing in a loose cluster at starboard. Jon goes to join them, craning and jostling his way through to try and see what they’re all looking at. The moment that he does, he stops in his tracks, so hard that one foot keeps an awkward angle against the floor.

At the centre of the gathering, right at the edge of the ship, stands Elias, his face grim and set. Beside him, a shorter, younger man with a gag pulled so tight across his mouth that in time it’ll rub his skin raw. He’s not bound, but from the size of the crew members nearest, he wouldn’t get a chance to do anything if he tried it. Instead, he just gazes resolutely skyward, and acknowledges nothing.

Elias says nothing, just regards his crowd, waiting as the last few hands trickle in. His eyes land briefly on Jon, and Jon looks away, unwilling to be singled out – he’s sure that Elias’ attention had been passing, sweeping over everyone without pause, but it still feels as if he’s been weighed, judged.

As he struggles not to give anyone cause to further notice him, Jon notices the woman from before, clearly as uneasy as he is – her hands are stuffed deep into her pockets, but still twitching, fidgeting, and she moves on her feet too much, as if she’s trying to curb the impulse to pace.

She must feel him looking – she glances sideways, sharp enough to skewer him, and he turns his attention firmly and unwaveringly to the deck in front of him, until Elias starts to speak. His voice is almost hypnotic, draws Jon’s mind and drowns out the rest of his thoughts.

“This man,” he says, slow and soft – he doesn’t _need_ to shout, not when the whole crew leans in to hear him, make sure they don’t lose a single intonation to the sound of the breeze in their sails. “Eric Delano, went ashore in Histon, and chose to spend his time on land obtaining prohibited materials, rather than attending the tasks I set him.” He raises a hand, and a single strip of black cloth ripples around his closed fist. Jon can just about make out a repeating, intricate pattern shimmering across it, somehow stitched in a darker thread. He’s still trying to make out the detail when Elias releases his fingers, and the wind rips the cloth away, slapping it into the edge of the mainsail, and then dragging it off out of sight. “Unfortunately, this is not behaviour that I can permit among my crew.”

Jon doesn’t look around in time – he’s craning to see where the piece of cloth went, wondering what exactly it was, why its possession had resulted in this. He hears the impact, flesh on flesh, but he doesn’t see it. Just the moment before Eric Delano drops out of sight, that dispassionate mask swept away into a terrified contortion of features, eyes wide and pleading, scream bubbling against the gag. The noise sits in Jon’s head after it’s gone silent, lost to the breeze they leave in their wake. He’s carried by the press of the crowd to the side, finds himself peering over just in time to hear the snap.

Eric Delano dangles, rope so taut about one ankle that the limb is no longer at a natural angle. He swings like a pendulum on a cruel king’s clock, grabs for the hull when he’s dashed into it, but slips away with another muffled cry.

Jon traces the line of the rope back up, across the ship, and finds it secured to the mainmast. It cuts tight across the deck, and the rapidly dispersing crew gives it so much space that Jon would almost assume it plague-touched.

“Pull him up in the evening,” Elias says, leaning in to one of his crew – Emma, Jon remembers, who had tried to stop him coming aboard but not acknowledged him since. “If he climbs up before sunset, push him over again.”

Jon hurries away before he hears what Emma says in response, far too aware of the rapidly emptying deck and unwilling to be left exposed on it. He thinks, as he descends into the hatch, that he sees the woman from before, vanishing around a corner, but she doesn’t look back and he can’t be sure.

He doesn’t need to be. Just goes back to his own cabin, and tries to convince the tremble out of his hands. It’s stubborn, though, won’t still, and even sitting on them only brings temporary relief. He paces to his desk for paper, throws the sheet down again when there’s no pen, glares at the chair that one of Elias’ people had brought around, and tells himself that he shouldn’t be so shaken. It’s not as if he’s never heard of keelhauling, knew it as a vague and violent far-off thing that happened on board the skybound ships.

Elias just hadn’t seemed the type. He’d been genial, helpful. Willing to go out of his way to get Tim and Martin back. And then he’d been matter-of-fact and firm about it as he’d pushed a man overboard.

Jon feels sick. He wants to go back up, clear out his lungs, but he knows that if he does he’ll just end up looking for Eric Delano’s hanging shape, should just stay here and be glad that his cabin is on the opposite side of the hull from the suffering outside.

He opens the tiny cupboard, in search of ink, but the impulse to find any flies from his head when his eyes land on Tim and Martin’s clothes, hung as neatly as possible while his own stuff is in a bundled heap at the bottom. He could lean in, he knows, breathe in the smell of them, shut his eyes and do everything that he can to pretend that he’s back in the museum, that none of it had happened. Or perhaps that it’s all already happened, that he’d found them and they were as alive as Elias had said they were, that the sails had been full all the way home.

He doesn’t even know if it’d be safe to bring them aboard anymore. If, by rescuing them, all he’d be doing was trading one source of danger for another. If they don’t do something to Elias’ satisfaction, if they don’t realise something’s not allowed before they do it, they might end up where Eric Delano is.

_Find them first_ , he reminds himself, and forces himself to pick up his writing things, close the door behind them. If he has to, he’ll take them ashore and they’ll find another way back to Larkrest. They’ll be together, and alive, and that’s what’s important.

He tries to start another letter to Sasha. Doesn’t know what to tell her. In his previous efforts, he’d been trying to present Elias as he’d seen him – their best hope, their way forward – and the idea of taking that image from her niggles like a thorn at the back of his skull. She’s probably awake again, maybe for good now, recovering and probably reading all the manifests the townspeople had put together, studying the mess he’d left her.

She’ll understand, he knows, but he still scribbles out another apology, and an assurance that once they get back she can have all the time off she wants. Follows it up with his usual nonsense – that those chrysalises Martin was keeping will probably hatch and need releasing soon, that she’ll need to let Georgie Barker know what has happened, so she can cancel her trip over from her own collection.

It feels like he can read Elias’ actions in the blank spaces around the words. Excuses in absences, insisting that Elias knows how to handle his crew, that maybe it was necessary, that it’s not as if Jon has any other options. He presses the pen in too hard, scores into the paper in an effort to distract from them, and knows this isn’t one he’ll be sending. 

* * *

Mike Crew is as good as his word – they’re not forced back to the cell. Instead, he’d shown them to a cabin at the back of the second deck down, told them to call out if they needed anything, and then ducked out. They key still turns in the lock as he goes, and Martin sees Tim wince at the sound of it, his eyes flickering to Martin like he’s expecting another panic attack, but there’s no threat of one stealing the breath from Martin’s chest, only the last traces of the old one, keeping him a little unsteady.

Tim’s gaze lingers anyway, but he says nothing, just shifts on the balls of his feet for a second, and then moves a little closer.

“This is… nicer,” Martin tries, struggling to put in the observation that he’s okay now, that he’s not about to come apart again, that Tim doesn’t have to _hover_. He could try telling him outright, but Tim would only deny it, going by last time, and it’s not as if Martin doesn’t appreciate that he cares – he does, more than he’s willing to admit to him.

At least, if nothing else, it’s also the truth. The room is large, or at least as large as can be managed on ship, the walls to either side curving at the edges. The one at the back is broken by the large glass panes of a window that stretches the whole width of the room, provides a vast panoramic view of the world behind them. There are curtains, thick and dark, but they’re hooked back, enough dust on the ties that Martin isn’t convinced they’ve ever been drawn.

Martin moves towards the window almost without meaning to, finds his eyes drawn up, towards the sky, the distant curls of clouds gathering on the horizon. It’s still so beautiful, makes him want to write, but even if he had had paper and pens, he knows that he doesn’t have the words even to cast it all into poetry.

“Do you think that opens?” Tim asks, reaching out to prod at the edges, searching for a latch. “Maybe when we come to port…” He trails off, finding nothing, and turns away to study the rest of the space.

“I think we’re on the wrong side to climb out onto the dock,” Martin says, but his voice feels hazy, distant. He should check, too, he knows, but when he tries to direct his attention across the panes, it always ends up sticking on something outside – passing birds, the tiny blurs of green blow them that might be trees, grand woodlands that he’s never seen. He rests his forehead briefly against the glass, and his stomach lurches with the abrupt certainty that there’s no barrier, nothing between him and the void. He welcomes it – it means space to breathe, the breeze scouring the cobwebs from his head. “I think we’ll be able to watch the sunset, though.”

“Lovely.”

Martin makes himself turn, though he knows that he could have sat, stared out and watched the sky change until there was no longer any light to see it by. Tim has settled on the end of the bed, and is peeling his jacket off, gathering a blanket over his legs.

“I’ll take the floor,” Martin says, and Tim stops halfway through extracting an arm, frowns at him.

“Why would you need to do that?” he asks, slowly, like the concept is somehow completely baffling. “There’s plenty of room on here for the both of us.”

Martin casts a critical eye over the bed – it’s larger than the ones they have back at the museum, grander, the legs and headboard carved with swirling shapes reminiscent of mist, but it’s still not massive.

“If you don’t mind a bit of cuddling,” Tim amends, finally escapes his jacket and glances around for somewhere to drape it. “But I was assuming you didn’t have a problem with that, after the cupboard. Where do you think I should put this? It’s _almost_ dry.”

Martin takes it from him, hangs it over the back of a chair, and tries to keep his back turned as long as possible, to convince the flush out of his cheeks. Of course Tim has no idea why Martin might be reticent to share a bed with him. Probably doesn’t even occur to him. No reason why it should.

Better to focus on the rest of the room – the desk, large and oak and expensive but lined with the same amount of dust as the curtain ties, like it had been put in as standard when the ship had been built, but the room’s usual occupant had had nothing to use it for. On the wall above it, where he might have expected a map or chart of some kind, is a painting, simply-framed. It shows a village, huddled amidst a landscape of cliffs and mountains, but the majority of the canvas is given over to the sky. It’s a winter one, Martin thinks, with only the faintest hints of pale blue, and as he stars into it, he thinks that he can almost make something out amongst the clouds, immense and looking.

“What do you make of him, then?” Tim’s question jolts Martin away from the painting, almost leaves him stumbling. When he looks again, whatever he’d seen is gone.

“What?” Martin asks, makes a conscious effort to step away.

“Michael Crew,” Tim seems to weigh the name, testing it around his mouth. “Mike. Our gracious host.”

“Oh.” Martin hesitates, drifts across the room. It’s fairly well-appointed, a door off to one side into an enclosed space that he would guess is for washing. Beside it, shelves filled with rows and rows of books. He goes to them, recognises a few volumes from Jon’s collection, with a pang in his chest. “He’s… gracious?”

“Yeah. It’s weird,” Tim says. “He’s our captor. I don’t want to still be in there, but it would be normal for him to keep us locked up like the Stranger did. But instead we get… this. What do you think he’s up to?”

“Maybe that’s just how he is?” Martin suggests, distracted. He traces a finger across the books’ spines, not quite touching. “He’s Vast. He can do what he likes.”

“I suppose.” Tim sighs, and Martin can hear in the sound that he’s unsettled, exhausted. “It’s just. Really nice in here.” There’s a shifting of cloth, a rustle of blankets. “You should really try this bed out.”

“Hm.” Martin lets his hand fall onto the shelf, absently notices that it’s clear of dust. “Do you think we’re allowed to read these?”

“I think it’s not fair to put us in a room with books if he didn’t want us to touch them,” Tim says. “Why don’t you leave them for now, though? I can see from here that your sleeves are still wet.”

Probably for the best. Martin turns away, and is faced with Tim, lounging on the bed in search of the most comfortable position. Above him, the ceiling is painted with constellations, silver and midnight blue. When he looks at it for too long, the room around him seems to darken, as if it wants to pull him into the night before time.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Tim suggests. He pats the bed next to him, offers Martin a tired smile. “I think you could do with it.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Martin says, but it’s not strictly true – it feels like that morning was years ago, if it even was that morning. They could have been unconscious for any length of time in the Stranger ship’s hold. He’s just not ready to. His limbs and mind drag, but the idea of resting them feels as sensible as trying to smash the window mid-flight.

He goes anyway, perches there and tries not to draw in his breath when Tim takes his hand again, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It had felt that way before, when there had only been terror and height and rain, but things are quieter now. He shouldn’t read into it. Tim probably just needs the comfort.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Martin asks, hardly above a whisper. “Jon and Sasha?”

“Probably looking for some new help,” Tim says, voice flat and uncompromising, though his fingers stay gentle. “I’m sure they’ll miss us terribly.”

“ _Tim_.” The protest aches in Martin’s throat, but he can’t follow it up, can’t offer excuses or explanations.

“What else can they do?” Tim shrugs, an awkward one-shouldered thing against the headboard. “I know how these things go. They’ll put a notice out. Nothing will happen. We’re gone. It’s just us now.”

“I just…” Martin glances away, back towards the painting, trying to hide his expression, how badly he wants to reject the statement, doesn’t have the words to. “I hope they’re okay.”

Tim squeezes his hand, and then skims his thumb over his knuckles. Pauses, like he’s trying to give Martin a chance to object, clearly doesn’t realise that Martin can’t speak for the breath that’s sticking in his throat, and then begins to trace patterns against his wrist.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Me too.”


	5. Chapter 5

Elias calls for Jon again that night. Not in person – Emma comes over to him when he’s collecting his dinner and tells him the captain wants to see him again, same time as before. Smirks as she says it, leaves him to retreat back to his room.

He stares down into his stew for half an hour, watching it get cold, and considers not going at all.

They’d pulled Eric Delano up at sunset, like Elias had ordered. Jon hadn’t wanted to go and look, see what had become of him, but he’d found himself there anyway, unable to take his mind off it. Delano’s hands and clothes had been in ribbons from where he’d tried to climb the ship’s hull and found only ice, fingers splitting, curled into stiff claws from the cold, lips blue and eyes stuck in some faraway place from which his crewmates had been unable to rouse him. He won’t, Jon is sure, unless the ship’s surgeon is Flesh-touched, be able to take on his duties again for a very long time; his ankle is so severely broken that it’s a wonder the rope hadn’t just slipped right off, and he has open wounds from the beaks and talons of opportunistic birds.

He’d fled Delano’s frozen, terrified face, and still sees the afterimage of the man’s vacant stare on the backs of his eyelids.

Elias might find it there. Where Tim and Martin should be in his mind, this broken, immediate imposter. Jon has no idea what he would do with it.

He turns his spoon in his stew, watching as the swirls of grease eddy in its wake, and feels the odour hit the back of his throat, hard enough that he stands away from his desk and leaves it to whatever rodents might be aboard.

He _has_ to go, he tells himself. Elias has summoned him – not going would constitute disobeying an order that Emma could testify that he’d received, and maybe that would be as bad as what Eric Delano had done.

Besides, they’re making progress. He knows the others are alive now, that he _has_ a chance at getting to them, bringing them home. Whatever he has to do, it’ll be worth it, for that.

If Elias has a problem with him remembering the keelhauling, then he shouldn’t have made a spectacle of it.

Jon’s resolve lasts until he comes within sight of Elias’ cabin, when the nausea starts to flood back in. He pretends that he can’t feel it, reminds himself that there’s nothing in his stomach for him to bring up anyway.

The door opens a fraction of a second before he knocks, and he recoils so hard that he nearly falls, manages to catch himself against the wall with a scrape of his palm against the boards.

“Jon,” Elias says, blandly. He steps to the side, gestures for Jon to go inside. Jon swallows, steadies himself, and steps over the threshold. “You’re late. I wasn’t expecting that from you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, automatic and scarcely meant. “I just got caught up in, in writing to Sa– my last assistant. I want her to know I’m safe.” More lies, coiling out of him like tobacco smoke, without his permission. Elias can probably smell it just as easily.

“It’s quite all right,” Elias says, punctuating it with the noise of the door closing, the key turning in the lock. “I understand it’s been a… lot for you, these past days.” He turns, takes a moment to regard Jon, while Jon scrutinises his expression for any traces of the shapes it had held before he’d pushed Eric Delano overboard. “I would just like to check that this is still something you want to continue with?”

“If it finds my assistants, I don’t care what it is,” Jon manages. Tim would hate him for it, for being _complicit_. He can almost hear him taking issue with it now, the way he’d breathe before he’d launch into some retort or other. It doesn’t matter. Tim can hate him all he likes, so long as he’s alive to do it.

“Good.” Elias points him to his chair, and moves to take his own one. “Glad to see that you’re holding firm. I was concerned that the whole thing with Mr Delano might have shaken you a bit, but better you see the worst and judge of it sooner rather than later.”

“Hm,” Jon says, because Elias pauses as if he’s waiting for _something_ , and he doesn’t trust himself with real words now. He _needs_ Elias, can’t risk losing his help when no one else in the whole wretched sky would offer it. But if he speaks he’ll ask, demand to know what that cloth was that had been so offensive, how it could possibly have been so heinous that the penalty was _that_.

“I blame myself, of course,” Elias goes on, settling his hands onto the desk, fingers still where Jon’s want to tap, to scratch.

_You’re the one who pushed him_ , Jon thinks. _I don’t know who else you’d propose to blame._

“I shouldn’t have sent him ashore.” Elias pulls open a drawer with a scrape that makes Jon flinch, but he only takes out the same box from before, no little pistol or gleaming knife. “I could see that he was beginning to have… doubts. He was slow to respond to orders, reluctant about his task, would assess me from time to time. Ashore only has temptation, for someone in that state of mind. I should have talked with him, instead, reassured him, but at our last stop I felt it was better to send as many people into town as possible, to cover enough ground in a shorter time. The better to find your lost friends. Anyway.” He opens the box, then places the stone on the table in front of Jon. “I understand if you found it unpleasant. Perhaps thinking back to some happier times will make you feel a little better.”

“Perhaps.” Jon takes the stone, curls his fingers around it. It doesn’t seem quite so cold as it did before, as if it’s leeching the warmth out of him. “Do… do you see what I do?”

“It depends on how you define _see_ ,” Elias tells him. “It is not that I dream, as it were – it is not played out for me as the world around me now is, but I will know what you sensed. I imagine you will experience it for yourself before too long. Shall we begin?” 

Jon breathes out, struggling to keep the sound of it away from a sigh, forcing away the prickle of discomfort through his chest at the idea of Elias sitting over his memories like a spider, waiting to wrap his every thought and feeling in silk. They’re hardly _intimate_. Just a series of moments past that he hadn’t realised were important. Tim and Martin probably scarcely remember them.

“It was Tim’s anniversary,” he says, slow and soft, barely any sound in it at all, like he’s trying to stop Elias from hearing. “Not – not a wedding one, nothing like that. Tim’s not married, I don’t think he’s really looking for anything long-term, though I do wonder sometimes from the way he looks at Martin if– not a wedding one. It’s the day he came to Larkrest, which is a couple of days before I hired the three of them, and the others seem to think they’re both a cause for celebration. Sasha and Martin and I had put this plan together – it was Sasha’s idea, and I was glad that she was warming up to him again, things had been rather frosty between them for a while. Anyway, we went on this trip together. Not far – there were some ruins that he’d been reading about, and we thought we’d visit them.”

They hadn’t been able to afford a cabin for the journey over, but even if they had, Jon doubts they would have got any use from it. Martin had spent the whole time at the railing, gazing out at the skyscape like he’d never seen it before, probably would have been jotting down poetry notes if he’d had any paper on him. As it was, he’d had to settle for excitedly pointing things out to Tim, who’d seemed happy enough with the arrangement, occasionally resting his chin on Martin’s shoulder. If it hadn’t been for Jon they probably would have forgotten to get off.

The ruins themselves hadn’t seemed like much, to Jon at least – Tim had said that they’d probably been constructed before the skybound age, but there was little to see beyond a few ancient walls, stones were grown over with moss and lichen. He’d liked the woods, though, the short walk to it. It had been a day of warmths, from the hazy hum of bees on ivy to the dappling of sunlight through the trees, the slow summer tumble of a river whose banks they’d stopped to eat on.

Tim had insisted on swimming, found the reflection-glimmered surface of the water too inviting to refuse. When he’d surfaced, shaking an arc of silvering droplets from his hair, he’d laughed and gone to drag Martin in with him, considered Sasha too for a moment and then backed off at her raised eyebrow.

Jon wouldn’t have swum, but a small part of him had twinged at not being asked, like a muscle he hadn’t known how to exercise.

“You spent a lot of time with them,” Elias comments, breaking into the memory of the day, and for all that he seems to try and do it delicately, it still feels like the cold of a storm, blowing in at the horizon of a memory where one didn’t belong.

“Not as much as I would’ve liked,” Jon says. Not like that, he means. There are so few days like that, compared to weeks on end working with them every day, living with them in the same house, burying himself in his books and his artefacts instead of following the sounds of laughter to the kitchen, joining them on their trips out or at Larkrest’s occasional festivals.

“Well, perhaps you will get the chance again,” Elias suggests, with a carefully gauged smile. “They do remain alive. I’m getting a sense of… space.”

“Space?” Jon echoes, manages, he thinks, to keep the shades of resentment out of his voice. “Is that helpful?” 

“It means that they’re almost certainly not being kept with the rest of the Stranger’s victims,” Elias says, settling his stone back in the box with a flourish, and holding out a hand for Jon’s. Jon gives it over without ceremony. “Prisoners, as far as I understand it, tend to be kept together below decks in rather cramped conditions. It may not seem useful to you know, but it could be vital once we find the ship they’re on.”

Jon doesn’t have it in him to doubt it, after everything. Those fears that seemed to have come to nothing, dredging up those long-ago times of the others, switching between that contentment and the guilt and anxiety that still wants to knot in his stomach, it all seems to overspill him.

He takes his leave, and moves down through the ship like a ghost, hazy and scarcely thinking, letting his feet find the way as his brain abandons him. Sleep, he thinks, like a balm.

Two metres from his cabin, he stops as though struck. He’d left worried, and careful with it, and though he runs the memory over and over in his head, he can find in it no possibility that he could have left his door open.

* * *

Tim wakes with screaming in his ears. He’s tangled into sheets and blankets and limbs, breathing so heavily that it takes him too long to notice that the noise hasn’t followed him into consciousness; it fades until it’s barely an echo in his skull, a voice that might have belonged to him or Martin or Danny or Sasha or _anyone_. Can’t remember what he’d been dreaming, but he lies there in the soft glow of the lantern he’d decided not to extinguish, and lets the last of it drift away.

He’s warm now, at least. Had been half-sure he never would be again, but at some point while he’d been sleeping he’d managed to wrap himself around Martin, head resting against his shoulder, and it seems that between the two of them, they’ve been able to chase the last of the chill away.

It’s still not something that he’d have chosen to do if he’d been conscious. Tim doesn’t know if it makes it better or worse that Martin’s reciprocated, one arm a welcome weight against Tim’s back. It’s not anything, he supposes, not something significant that can’t be taken back, just a speck of comfort on a bed they can’t lie apart on, after far too long awake.

He sighs, the sound of it stirring the air across the dim room, and over towards where the desk had been, something moves.

“Sorry.” The voice is hushed, careful, but Tim still sits bolt upright, disentangling himself from Martin faster than he would’ve thought possible. He shifts, reflexively, so that he’s between Martin and the faint shape he can make out, just past the edge of the lantern’s pooling light. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Mike Crew. Tim recognises his voice, calm and still with that veneer of politeness, so thin and with an impression of perilous nothing beneath it. His silhouette comes no closer, but Tim’s surer than he is of the deck below them that he wouldn’t need to.

“What are you doing here?” Tim demands, trying to shuffle closer to the edge of the bed. He’d feel better standing, he decides, though the idea of it makes the pain in his head start to sharpen again.

“There’s no need to disturb Martin.” Mike moves a little way to the side, and gestures at something on the top of the desk, that looks to Tim like it might be a covered plate. “I brought you some food, but you were both sleeping.”

“How do you know his name?” Tim reaches his feet down to rest against the floor, and then settles one hand carefully over what he thinks is Martin’s ankle, ready to shake him awake if he needs to. “We never told you.”

“Oh.” Mike rocks slightly, tucks his hands into his pockets. “I’m afraid you did – you were calling for him in your sleep. I assumed.”

Tim chews at nothing, settles his teeth more awkwardly against one another.

“Did you not consider knocking?” he grinds out, past them. The question feels ludicrous, but the laugh can’t make it out of him. They’re still _prisoners_. If Mike wants to just walk in on him, there’s nothing they can do about it.

“I forgot,” Mike tells him, and it’s a lame enough excuse that Tim can’t disbelieve it. “It is something that you don’t tend to do when you’re walking into your own cabin.”

“This…” Tim coughs, forms the words a little too completely, syllables spiking. “This is _your_ cabin?”

Mike shuffles far enough into the light that Tim can make out his expression – little point in it, when there’s nothing there, but he stops again, makes no effort to come any nearer.

“None of the others were free,” he says, as if that could possibly make this situation anything close to normal.

“Where are you sleeping?” The question bubbles out of Tim without his consent, and he curses it, doesn’t _care_ about their captor’s berth arrangements.

“I’m not.” Mike shrugs with one shoulder. “I’m Vast. I can manage a few days without it, and if I need to I can sleep out on deck.”

“Aren’t you worried about a mutiny?”

“Not particularly.” Mike smiles, but this time there’s nothing genuine about it, just a faint curl to the edge of his lips that touches nothing else. “I’m a light sleeper. And I’m sure the crew remembers what happened last time. If you’re uncomfortable with the situation, you can go back below, but that hardly seems appropriate accommodation for guests.”

“No.” Tim breathes it out, slow and resigned. Martin doesn’t deserve that. For all that being kept in the captain’s quarters feels like the start of one of the terrible romance stories that Sasha had enjoyed reading and tearing to pieces, Mike is at least not making any moves towards imposing himself, and his stare stays directly levelled at Tim, no slow eyeing of Martin’s sleeping form. This isn’t a novel, no matter how much Mike looks like he could have been lifted from one. That isn’t going to happen.

“In that case, I suggest you get comfortable.” Mike goes as if to take a step back, and then stops himself. “Food’s on the desk. You don’t have to eat it now, it’ll be fine cold.”

Tim gives Martin’s leg a shake, turns his head to look at him, but keeps his attention on Mike, even when Martin groans and tries to roll further into the blankets.

“Martin,” he says. “Wake up, food’s here.”

“Go away,” Martin mumbles, mouth half pillow, and swats a vague hand towards him. 

“Food’s here,” Tim repeats, more loudly. He can feel Mike’s gaze on them, weighing up the interaction, and it makes his skin a little too warm. “And the captain.”

Martin scrambles upright, tries to put his weight on an arm that’s hanging over the edge of the sheet, and nearly falls off the bed. He slithers to Tim’s side, only narrowly avoids head-butting him, and manages to stop there, eyes wide and hair sticking up like he’d been on deck all evening.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” he hisses. “Tim, I–” He clamps his mouth shut, hard, and somehow looks even more panicked.

“Tim,” Mike says, though without any particular emphasis or sense of victory. “Nice to meet you. I would have preferred you introduce yourselves, but can’t be helped now. I did bring some food – it’s on the desk – so I’ll leave you in peace, unless you’d like some company.” 

“Why?” Tim pushes himself up onto his feet, and tries to bury a wince as the impact jars up into his head. “Why would we want your company?”

“I thought you might have questions,” Mike says. He blinks, as if he’s realigning things his head. “And I wouldn’t mind answering. I find you interesting.”

“ _Why_?” Tim repeats. The idea of being _interesting_ itches, is already trying to leave hives across his skin, through his mind, in the sound of the Stranger woman’s voice.

“Your circumstances are unusual,” Mike says. “I know my crew as much as I care to. I don’t know you. Perhaps I’ll find no more in you than I did in them, but for the moment I’m still curious, and we’re expecting nothing but smooth sailing.” 

“We’d prefer to eat alone,” Tim says, as flat as he can make it. Testing, half-expecting an argument, a reinforcement of the power dynamics of the situation, for Mike to remind them that he can put them overboard at any point, return them to the cupboard, but he just nods.

“As you like,” he says, moving to the door and reaching for the handle. “Do call out if you need anything. I’ll talk to my surgeon to see if she has anything for your head.”

“Is it all right if we read the books?” Martin asks, just blurts it out like they’re on one of Jon’s library trips. Tim elbows him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Yes,” Mike says, glances back at them as he steps over the threshold. “But don’t fold the pages. They don’t like that.” He pulls the door shut on it, and there’s a moment of still before Tim rounds on Martin.

“Do _not_ touch those books,” he snaps, more violently than he means to, but his tone seems to just slide off Martin, still too much sleep in his face.

“Books?” he echoes, bleary and lifting one first to rub his knuckles over his eyes.

“Books that _don’t like things_ are not books we should be going near, Martin.” Tim exhales too hard through his nose, and pushes away the memory of that fucking vase, of blood on Martin’s face and how long his hands had been shaking. He makes himself move, stalks over to the desk and pulls the covering off the food. It’s a larger plate, with two bowls of some kind of soup on it. He gives one a brief prod with a spoon, but it doesn’t magically indicate whether or not it might be drugged or poisoned. 

“I’m sorry I told him your name,” Martin says, too soft, like he’s tried to guess what’s made Tim like this. Come up wrong.

“Don’t be.” Tim picks up one of the bowls, reasons that if Mike had wanted to drug them he could have just done it, and tests it on his tongue. Still warm, but not hot enough to burn his tongue. Squash, maybe. Not enough seasoning. “I already gave him yours. It’s all just… really fucked up. You know this is his cabin?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Tim glowers down into his bowl, and waits to see if he starts feeling wrong. “I don’t know why he’s bothering being so nice.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t meet many new people?” Martin suggests, always too ready with the benefit of the doubt.

“He could if he wanted to,” Tim points out. Finds a faint discomfort in his stomach, but he’s not sure that hasn’t been there since they were taken, stress and anxiety coiling and biting into his insides. “He’s the captain, he can stop the ship whenever he wants.”

“Does it really matter?” Martin wanders over to him, reaches for the other bowl of soup, and Tim fights the impulse to slap his hand away, tell him to wait until Tim’s sure it’s safe. He’s not sure he’d ever feel certain enough of it to say.

“Of course it _matters_.” Tim turns on his heel to glare, but Martin’s testing the food himself now, not looking. “He’s in control of whether or not we live or die. How he treats us is _very_ concerning to me.”

“But that’s just it?” Martin blows on his soup, and then tries it, frowns a little. “He can do whatever he wants to us. He’s chosen to treat us kind of well, and I’m not exactly in a hurry to get him to start behaving differently. Even if he does decide to kill us in the end, at least it hasn’t been awful the whole time.”

“I guess.” Tim tries to let the heat fade out of him with the words, but he can still feel it prickling, somewhere at the back of his head. He trails back towards the bed, slumps on the end of it and attempts another mouthful of food. “I just hate all of this. I want to go home.”

Home. It’s a strange word for what he’d meant to be one month to fill his pockets again before he went back to chasing his own tattered ghosts across the air currents. But that’s what the museum had become, when day after day had turned into years and he’d still been smiling at the same faces, easier and easier.

Martin touches his arm, says something that Tim doesn’t hear the words of. It’s probably meant to be comforting, and he decides it doesn’t matter if that’s something he takes anyway, from the familiar cadence of Martin’s voice, his presence on the bed beside him, the scrape of his spoon against his bowl.

Still one thing he hasn’t lost yet.

* * *

Jon’s first impulse is to go back to Elias. Tell him what’s happened, get some kind of help. Emma, maybe, solid and formidable, or Elias himself, authority in every precise fold in his clothing. Anyone but _him_ , not just without training but without a single speck of experience in violence. Whatever it is, they’ll be able to stop it, stamp it out hard enough that there’ll be no trace of it.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t do it, why he instead keeps approaching. Slowly, as quietly as he can, but he carries on. Someone has decided to break into his room, might still be there, and he has _questions_ , none of which will be getting answered if Elias sweeps his intruder away like lint on the wind.

Perhaps it’s the guilt that runs in a narrow thread at the back of his psyche, thrums with the sound of Eric Delano’s screams, and tells him that he can’t be responsible for something like that.

He pauses, just before the threshold, and tries to remember if there’s anything he brought with him that he might be able to use as a weapon, comes up empty. He might be able to make it to the chair, tells himself that even someone who’s never been in a fight before can swing something large and heavy and do damage with it.

One long breath, a moment to hold the warmth of his memories with Tim and Martin in the forefront of his mind and steady himself, and he steps inside.

“Close the door.”

The voice is taut and measured, comes from the woman from before. She’s sitting on the end of his bed, a matrix of sharp angles that culminates in her grip on the knife in her hand, wickedly sharp and glinting in the sparse lantern light. She pushes herself to her feet as he enters, clearly ready to strike if he makes a single move towards attacking.

“What do you want?” Jon moves more fully inside, and gropes about by the door as he pushes it closed, hoping that he might be able to fumble his hand onto his bag strap, at least have something to hold between himself and the blade, but it’s too low down for him to manage to get hold of it without her noticing.

“I want you to do as I say,” the woman says. “If you do, I won’t hurt you.”

Jon gives a tight nod, and stays silent. Listens, in case of footsteps in the corridor, any sign that someone might be passing that he could call to, but all that he can hear is the faint humming of the engines through the walls.

“Sit down,” she orders, gestures him to the floor on the other side of the room with the point of the knife.

He goes, takes his place with his back against the wall. It’s uncomfortable, the boards vibrating softly against his back and his legs complaining at the angle, but it’s at least better than his place in Elias’ office. Better than getting stabbed, too. 

“What do you want with me?” he asks again, finds his tone has a little more force in it. “I’ve seen you watching – why?”

“I want your help,” she says, her face twitching like she detests it.

“You have a strange way of asking for it,” Jon says, with a sharp, harsh laugh that cracks out of his throat like a cough.

“I am asking the only way I can.” She sighs, perches on the edge of the bed again, loosens her grip on the knife, but it’s still clear enough to him that she’d be able to change that the instant he tried anything. “Melanie King.”

“Jonathan Sims.” Jon expects that his name means about as much to her as hers does to him, has no reason to hesitate over giving it, though something at the back of his brain still squirms as he does so, insists that it isn’t _safe_ , that he can’t let anyone _know_. 

“We need to talk about Elias,” Melanie says, chooses her words carefully, like she’s picking her way across a floor littered with broken glass. “I know you think he’s helping you, but-”

“You said before that I’d never see them again,” Jon’s voice heats, and he presses his teeth against each other, struggles to remember that she has the knife. 

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said it like that,” Melanie says, and he can see that it’s the closest she’ll get to an apology. “He just… he won’t get them back for you.” 

“No.” Jon shakes his head, pulls his knees up defensively. “He’s been showing me, he says they’re alive and-”

“It’s not a matter of _ability_ ,” Melanie interjects, and there’s a hint of impatience coming through now, speaks to a whole lot more she’s managing to strangle back. “He probably could find them, save them. He just won’t. He just needs you to need him.”

“How could you possibly know?” 

“I’ve been where you are.” It comes out loud, angry, and her attention flickers to the door, like she’s afraid someone might have heard. “When I signed on, I was desperate, too. Marked. My life was a storm and Elias was the single point of calm. He promised I’d be safe, that we’d find a way to make sure. He said I had an aptitude for his magic.” She trails off, her eyes unfocussing for a second. Maybe, Jon thinks, he could make it up, try to wrestle the knife off her. Dismisses the thought - Melanie’s stronger than he is, hardened by life aboard ship, and he’s still more a man of papers and ink. 

“What happened?” he asks, instead, keeps it soft, tries to encourage without intruding. 

Melanie snaps back to herself, and gives an awkward, one-shouldered shrug that’s far too nonchalant. 

“It turned out I didn’t have quite the skill he thought I did,” she says. “He stopped meeting with me, and we started calling in at broken towns again. Like yours. He likes to pick at the remains, see if there’s anything in them desperate enough for him to string along. Then the next time he sent me ashore, I got shot. I managed to drag myself back aboard, which I don’t think he was expecting. Someone had already started to clear out my cabin.”

“So what’s the point?” Jon demands. “What’s he _stringing me along_ for?”

“I don’t know _exactly_ ,” Melanie says, raises the knife to quell his scoffing. “But I think he’s experimenting. He makes a lot of his magic, and how he uses it without it using him, but maintaining himself comes at the cost of limiting his abilities. Maybe he wants the power or the longevity, but needs to find a way of anchoring his mind, too. So he takes people, watches them while they give themselves to the Eye, and he learns.”

“Do you have any evidence of any of this?” 

“Eric was looking for his son,” Melanie tells him, and she’s less brash with it, enough for him to wonder if Eric had been a friend. “His wife took him. But Eric wasn’t good enough either, and Elias stopped making promises. Never gave up, though, and he’s as likely to find Gerry here as he is anywhere else. The one after me _was_ good enough. Rosa Meyer. I don’t know what happened to her after she started turning up in our dreams covered in eyes, but I do know that she never found her brother. He wants you to be something else, and you need to _stop_.”

“No,” Jon says, feels her insistence like a slap to his face from something he can’t stand to look at. “No, this is all just - assumption and hearsay. Maybe Eric’s son _couldn’t_ be found, but Tim and Martin _can_ -”

“Help me take him down,” Melanie interrupts, louder and faster. “You saw what he did to Eric - even if your friends _are_ still alive, he is not the kind of person you want around them.” 

“No, if there’s even a _chance_ -”

“He’s not the way.” Melanie breathes for a moment, and when she speaks again, her voice is more modulated, colder. “He’s probably lying to you anyway. Once you don’t care anymore you’ll look back and find out they died the day they were taken and-”

“Get out.” Jon stands, glares at her with as much force he can muster, his eyes stinging. “Leave me alone, and I won’t tell Elias anything about this conversation.”

Melanie gets up, meets his gaze, level and far from intimidated, but she walks towards the door anyway, takes her time about it. 

“If you change your mind,” she says. “My cabin is on the other side of the ship. Next to the kitchen.”

“I won’t,” Jon tells her, as firm as he can make it. Still brittle, or, at least, feels that way to him, but perhaps she doesn’t notice. She gives no indication one way or the other, just shrugs as if to tell herself she’d tried, and steps out into the corridor, grants him one last backwards glance.

“He’s not what you’re looking for,” she adds, but it’s a parting word, with no force to it. She knows there’s no point. He can see it in her face, a slight regret around the edges of her mouth that she won’t speak.

“He’s the only choice I have.” Jon slams the door across the sight of her, and locks it, as if the turn of the key can erase everything that she’d said.


	6. Chapter 6

Martin doesn’t feel like a prisoner anymore. Mike never locks them in, never threatens them, never mentions the Stranger’s plans. He still brings them their food, though he makes it clear they’re welcome to attend meals with the crew if they would prefer. On the few occasions that Tim agrees that he can stay to eat with them, he sits quietly, will engage with Martin when he tries to babble about the birds he’s seen through the window, struggling to take the edge off Tim’s defensive silence. They have free run of the ship, but Tim prefers to stay in Mike’s cabin, save for the occasional trip out onto the deck.

He’ll raise it, from time to time, tell Martin that it doesn’t matter what they’re afforded, they still can’t leave the ship. That they’re still being held against their will. Otherwise, he meets every one of Mike’s attempts at politeness with hostility, clenches his jaw every time Mike calls them _guests_ , interposes himself between Mike and Martin wherever he can.

Martin lets him. The monsters that had dropped out of the sky and stolen them from their home had had Tim’s name on their lips, and if the way he’s coping is with suspicion and sidelong glances, then Martin hopes it helps.

He sleeps better now, at least, tucked in close against Martin and bundled in blankets, the anger and fear smoothed out of his face. Their injuries have healed, bruises faded away to nightmare memories, and the ship flies high enough that it’s easier and easier for Martin to let himself believe that they’ll stay free of it all. 

Waiting for his own dreams to come, Martin tries to let himself be lulled, by the motion of the ship and the steady rhythm of Tim’s breathing. His mind won’t quiet, though, thoughts like jolts of static electricity running through his skin and keeping his eyes open.

Somewhere, Jon will be turning in for the evening, too. Checking the doors and windows are locked, letting the fire die in the grate, wishing only Sasha now a softly-spoken goodnight. It’s not been long enough, he tells himself, for Jon to have hired anyone new. The idea of it, of being _replaced_ , makes him want to scramble upright, pace around the room for a while, but Tim’s warm weight against him keeps him grounded.

It shouldn’t be unreasonable. The museum can’t run with two people, and like Tim had said, there’s nothing that Jon and Sasha can do about raiders. If Martin goes and falls in love, that’s his fault, and it’s not as if Jon would ever feel the same, even if he did just let the collection die.

Martin pictures him, standing in their half-empty offices, and misses him with a force that makes his chest ache. 

Beside him, Tim lets out a soft, slow sigh, and shifts closer into Martin, his face finding what’s becoming its customary place against Martin’s shoulder. Martin adjusts, squashes the impulse to run his fingers through Tim’s hair, and goes back to trying to force every little thought out of his head, one by one, so that he might join him in sleep.

There’s a soft knock at the cabin door, as unobtrusive as possible, but still enough to pull him from his efforts.

“Come in,” Martin calls, loud enough to rouse Tim – he feels him startle back into consciousness, but he doesn’t scramble away immediately. The first few times he’d woken up so close, he had, like he hadn’t thought he was allowed, and then slowly the distance he’d taken had decreased until he wasn’t moving at all.

For a couple of silent seconds, nothing changes, and then the door opens, Mike’s shape standing another moment longer on the threshold before he steps inside.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he says, but his tone of voice doesn’t resemble at all the emotion it claims to have in it – instead there’s something that’s almost excitement chasing around the edges of it. “Come with me.”

Tim pushes himself up against Martin’s side, and glares out in Mike’s direction.

“Do we have a choice?” he demands, the words sharpening as he burns sleep-blur from the syllables.

“Of course,” Mike says, and there’s something there that’s almost frustration. “But I would like you to. I have something to show you.”

Martin pushes the covers back, fumbles for his boots and the coats that Mike had found for them. Tim hisses something at him that he can’t make out, the exact sounds of it lost in a fumble of laces. He scrambles upright, too, and is fully dressed and snatching at Martin’s sleeve before he’s managed to finish tying his shoes.

“Martin,” he snaps, as if he doesn’t care that Mike is still waiting in the doorway, impatience charging the air around him. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I can’t sleep anyway,” Martin tells him, brushes past him on his way to the door. Tim lets out a low curse, but scrambles after him anyway, falls into step beside him and catches his hand in his.

Mike leads them out and up, pauses at the hatch up to the deck, and then pauses, gives a light touch against Martin’s arm that sets Tim’s grip on him tightening even further.

“Stay close,” he says. “It’s dark.”

Martin and Tim follow him up, and he’s right – the moment that he shuts the hatch behind them, it extinguishes the last of the light present, plunging them into a darkness so deep that Martin can’t even make out Tim beside him. Tim’s fingers dig at his skin, his tension so tangible that Martin imagines it too solid for the breeze to take.

“What are we doing out here?” Tim asks, and the anger that Martin knows should be in his voice is gone, overtaken by a faint tremor and overwhelming uncertainty.

“You’ll be fine,” Mike says, and his hand finds Martin’s, pulls him around and towards the back of the deck. Martin stumbles, but Tim moves with him, steadying. “I know where the edges are.” 

Martin lets himself be led, angles his arm so that Tim is behind him – wants to tell him, _I know you don’t trust Mike, but you can trust me_. The words won’t come where Mike can hear, and he knows that Tim would protest that it’s Martin that he’s worried for, that the idea that Martin will step into any danger first isn’t something he finds reassuring.

He doesn’t even know if _he_ trusts Mike. Likes him, yes, enjoys his touch, cool as if he’s been on deck for long enough that he’s become a part of the sky, finds that his pulse quickens when Mike moves close to him, but he’s acutely aware that he doesn’t know him. That he’s dangerous, and that his choosing to be good to them doesn’t change that.

Still, there’s a voice in his head that sounds like Jon, that says that there were far more practical ways to kill them than dragging them out on deck in the middle of the night after _days_ of being nothing but courteous.

“Up here,” Mike says, and as Martin’s eyes adjust, he can just about make the shape of the steps up to the steering column ahead of him. He places Martin’s hand at the rail, and then splays his own against Martin’s side, encouraging him up. For a moment, Martin can’t move, flushing under his coat, and then Tim’s jostling behind him.

“I’ve got it,” he growls, when Mike presumably goes to guide him, too, a rustle of cloth and a stub of Tim’s hip against the wall.

“Wait for me at the top,” Mike says, mildly, and then there’s the steady, sure creak of his feet on the stairs behind them.

Martin does as he’s told, shuffles carefully up and then along to give Tim and Mike room behind him. The steering column sits ahead of them, looming out of the darkness, and as he eyes it, Tim slots in next to him again, as close as he’d been while he’d been sleeping. He’s shivering slightly, despite the coat, and Martin wraps an arm around him, half-expecting to be shoved away, but Tim doesn’t.

Mike ushers them forwards, to the very back of the ship, and then darts around, stops Martin with a touch at the centre of his chest.

“Look up,” he says, and the anticipation that’s been building in his voice and body language has reached its zenith.

Martin looks, and his breath catches in his throat. The sky overhead is dappled across with stars, more than he would ever have believed would existed, would have assumed that it had to be painted, were it not for the fact that no one could ever render this correctly on canvas. There is a distinct path, stretching from horizon to horizon, the line that the ship follows, and still glimmering at either side, forming constellations that he’d never seen in any of Jon’s books. It’s their light that’s cast over the deck, a faint glow that catches against their sails.

“Tim,” Martin whispers, but he has nothing to add to it, no words he can voice about the cathedral night they stand above them.

“Yeah,” Tim says, hoarse and soft. “Yeah, I see it.”

“You like it?” Mike is close, near enough that there’s a fleeting impulse in Martin’s mind to lean down and kiss him. He sounds different, something swelling in his tone that’s so far removed from his usual remote politeness that he’s certain Mike would kiss back. This means something to him, something that he wants to share with them.

There is no space in his head to do it. The uncertain want, the low question of whether Mike’s lips would be as cool as his fingers – he can’t focus on it, just as he can’t consider the silhouettes of the mountains at the edges of his vision.

“ _Like_ isn’t really the word,” Tim murmurs, still hushed. Martin understands – there’s not enough in the word. It can’t encompass everything, barely even scratches the surface. The way it feels is not something that can be expelled as breath.

When Martin glances sideways at him, he can make out the glinting reflection of the starlight in his eyes, settling in new and unspoken constellations. Tim looks around in the same moment, his gaze lingering on Martin’s, and between those heartbeats, Martin could almost fool himself into believing that he considers him as he does the night.

“I’m glad,” Mike says, and it’s almost stilted again, awkward. “Would... would you like to stay out here a while? I can fetch you some blankets. There’ll be a frost on the sails in the morning.”

“That would be nice,” Tim says. All the suspicion, all the fear and spite is gone, drained out of him, leaves that soft wonderment that Martin can feel in his own throat. “Thank you.”

Mike lingers, reaches out to take Martin’s hand again, raises it to place something into his upturned palm, and closes his fingers around it. It feels like thread, thin and fraying a little at the ends, and he tightens his grip as the breeze picks up, threatens to pull it away.

“Hold this for me,” Mike says, and then he’s gone, moving back down onto the deck as confidently as if he can see as well as in daylight.

Tim sits, tugging Martin down with him, leaning into his back so that he can look up more comfortably, and Martin is content enough to go. He half wants to ask if Tim is changing his mind, but this is not the place or the time for arguments. Just for adjusting as Tim does, listening to the sound of their breathing as it synchronises, and watching the stars.

* * *

The signs remain the same. Days pass, and every night, Jon leaves tattered memories behind on the floor of Elias’ cabin, returns to his own with his eyes squeezed shut and hope sticking in his throat, raw and exposed where the words of better times had passed. Elias tells him they’re progressing, that Jon is growing stronger in the magic, but it feels like nothing has changed. He holds fast to what little he has, would give Elias the details of every hour he’d ever spent with them willingly in exchange for knowing they’re alive, but so far it’s brought them no closer.

When they call in at port again, at a town that Jon hasn’t bothered to learn the name of, he’s standing on the deck, holding tight to the rail so that the occasional lurch of the hull against the dock doesn’t throw him down. He clutches his letters to Sasha in his hands, and his lungs are more full of questions than air.

Maybe, if they’re going the right way, someone in this town might have seen the Stranger ship, might be able to give a course or a heading for them to try, something more tangible than just Elias’ word.

There’s a touch at his arm, and he startles around, eyes narrowing, but it’s just Elias, dressed to go ashore in neatened clothes and immaculate hat. He wears it all better than he does the smile, which is faint and conciliatory.

“I think it’s best if you stay on-ship today,” he says. “If you need anything, let Emma know, and she’ll pick it up for you.”

“I wanted to go and ask–”

“About Tim and Martin,” Elias fills in, nodding, raising a hand to quell Jon’s protests. “I understand, and I assure you that it’s all taken care of. My crew has experience in this area, and I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s better to leave this kind of thing to them.”

Jon barely manages to bite back on the impulse to spit, to ask whether Elias’ _experienced crew_ had helped Eric Delano find his son or Rosa Meyer her brother. He’s taut with it, muscles tense and jaw working.

“We wouldn’t want any mistakes made, after all.” Elias adds, cutting across his need to argue, knife-sharp. “If you do this wrong, you could have us go days out of our way chasing false leads. Your friends might not have time for that. Stay on the ship.”

Jon falters, glances down at the deck between his boots, studies the now-familiar pattern of whorls in the grain.

“I wanted to post my letters to Sasha,” he says, and the wild impulse to sneak away from the mail office, ask his own questions anyway, bubbles wordless and unspoken in his head. “So she’ll know I’m all right.”

“Emma will do that for you,” Elias says, glancing around, catching her eye and gesturing for her to join them. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have some business to attend to.”

He strides away, clearly certain that the matter is dealt with, and Emma takes his place in front of Jon, holds out her hand for the letters, her face flat with carefully smoothed-over dislike.

Jon hesitates, tightens his grip on the envelopes. She’s a stranger, and for all that he has no reason to believe she’d open them or not send them, it still feels wrong to just give them over to her. He’s talked to Sasha in ways he’s not sure he ever did when she was present, made promises and scribbled down memories and experiences he would never have gone into with anyone but her. They’re private.

But, if he doesn’t send them, she’ll never get them. Won’t know that Tim and Martin are alive, that Jon is, too, that something is being done. He pictures her, alone in that museum, doubting, worrying.

He hands over the letters, and Emma takes them without a word, goes back to where she had been before, talking with a few of her crewmates.

Jon stays where he is, watches her until she finally strides down the gangway, making sure that she is at least going the right way to post them, trying to settle the folding sensation in his chest. It’s going to be fine. Sasha will get the letters, will know that he’s not abandoned her, not been snatched.

By the time that he loses sight of Emma in the crush of people around the mail office, his breathing’s eased enough to turn away. As he does, his gaze catches on Elias’ hat, sticking up from the far left of the port space, right at the edge. He’s shaking hands with a woman, in the shadow of what looks to Jon like the town hall.

Jon ducks his head, squints, but all he can make out of her before she leads Elias out of eyeshot is that she’s dressed in black, clothes accented by the small armoury of holsters and sheathes secured to them.

He considers following. The crowd provides enough cover that he imagines he could get away with it, overhear any inquiries Elias is making without being caught, but when his attention shifts closer to home, the idea deflates, hard and fast. The group Emma had been talking to is standing near to the gangway, their stances loose, but they’re still clearly paying attention to it.

No way off the ship without being seen.

Sighing, he makes his slow, meandering way back towards the hatch, climbs down feeling heavier than he should, and leans into the wall, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light below decks.

“Can I talk to you?”

Melanie. Jon’s heart sinks somehow further, and he pushes himself upright, starts to walk quickly towards his cabin. She keeps pace easily, though her focus darts away from him every few seconds, like she’s trying to make sure they aren’t seen together.

“No,” Jon snaps, for good measure. “I thought I was clear enough last time. I don’t want any part of whatever you’re doing. If you hate your captain so much, why don’t you just jump ship while we’re in port?”

“It’s still not safe for me out there,” Melanie says, and snatches at his arm, trying to get him to slow down – he yanks it away from her, and tries to go faster. “Besides, me jumping ship isn’t going to fix anything for anyone else. He told you not to go and ask about your friends, didn’t he?”

“He’s putting his best people on the job,” Jon growls, making a turn so sharp that he knocks his wrist into the corner. He tucks his hand into his pocket, and lets the smarting pain of it fuel his annoyance. “Leave me alone.”

“People who will all say exactly what he wants them to say,” Melanie corrects, and she doesn’t even seem out of breath. “He’s controlling the narrative. No one can dispute it for fear of being keelhauled.”

Jon doesn’t reply, just keeps walking, though his boots land with more force than they had before, more than they need to. 

“Eric’s not recovering, by the way,” Melanie adds, and the anger in her voice is a little more solid now, the accusation there stinging against Jon’s mind like hailstones. “They’re going to leave him ashore here. Elias got his message across, and he doesn’t need him anymore.”

“Well,” Jon says, bites the word off. “If he will break the rules–”

“He bought a _blindfold_ ,” Melanie snarls, grabs Jon’s shoulder and spins him around, pushes him into the wall. It’s clearly just to stop him, not to hurt, but the jolt of the impact still rattles him. “Enchanted by the Dark, but still just a blindfold. To help him sleep. Elias’ magic left him with too much of his wife in his head. Nightmares. Do you think that’s enough to deserve what Elias did?”

“That’s not my decision to make,” he says, and he can tell from Melanie’s face that it’s not enough to placate her, her lips twisting.

“You _do_ keep deciding, though,” she says. “You choose to listen to him, and not me. Choose to keep on believing the little bits of bullshit he tells you about your friends. What did he go with last night? Still alive, longing for rescue, gazing up at the sky and imagining you do the same?” 

_Still alive_ , _a moment of peace_ , Jon remembers. Clamps his mouth shut around it, all teeth. He isn’t going to tell her that. They’re private, like his letters to Sasha, and Melanie’s already picked up far too much about them.

“They need me,” he manages, and it feels too weak, the last few flutters of a moth that’s been caught in a cobweb for far too long.

Melanie lets him go, or at the very least, doesn’t stop him when he pushes her aside and stumbles the last few metres to his cabin. He pulls the door closed without her following, and slumps back against it, lets his head knock into the wood.

She’s wrong, he tells himself. She has to be wrong. Maybe Eric _had_ had good reasons for buying the blindfold, but it was still magic, could have been dangerous in ways that he couldn’t have known about, and it’s _Elias’_ crew. He knows how to handle it.

Still, he finds himself moving slowly to his tiny slit of a window, peering out. He can’t see the port well, just a few stretches of stone up to where it reaches the town, the facades of a few shops. No sign of Elias or the woman he’d been talking to. He can hear, just about, the hum of voices, a slightly different key from the engines, hawking wares to the new visitors.

Larkrest will be like that, he thinks, when he gets back. Whole again, rebuilt, and it’s not likely that the village will suffer another raid in their lifetime.

He subsides onto his bed, and lies back, imagines it hard enough that he could almost believe it real. Martin’s smile, Tim’s laugh. They’re not hurt, and they’re his, and he takes them home and never loses them again.

It’s not out of reach. Elias tells him so, and he has to believe it.

* * *

Tim doesn’t understand it. Sure, at first, his reticence to trust their situation had made sense – they’d been through so much, stolen and locked away and threatened, and he hasn’t lived the kind of life that lets him believe in handsome strangers dropping out of the sky to save him. To begin with, he’d felt the same lancing dread from seeing Mike and his crew as he had from the Stranger pirates, and it hadn’t been out of place.

Then the days had passed and kept passing, and Mike had shown no inclination to violence around them, no more interest in their histories than the museum visitors might have. He’s been courteous, accommodating – the oddest thing Tim’s noticed from him is the occasional moment that he might almost have called shy. From the way his first mate behaves, frowning whenever he brings them out on deck, it’s an irritation to her, and not part of some master plan that’ll end with them both dead. He’s even started thinking of their retrieval from the Stranger ship as a rescue, rather than just another kidnapping. There is no tangible reason why he should feel any animosity towards Mike at all.

And yet he sits out on the steps up to the steering column in the sun, with no chains nor bars nor locks to trap him, in a borrowed coat, and he still can’t settle. Can’t keep his jaw relaxed. Just watches Martin, at the rail with Mike, every limb so tense that he knows they’re going to ache later, and can’t pull his eyes away.

It’s not even that he doesn’t like Mike. He’s good-looking, and while he’s a little too remote to be charming, he’s still calmly pleasant enough that Tim has no complaints about his company. Knows his way around the sky, too – he’s sure that they couldn’t have a better captain, and Martin would agree, if the way that he looks anywhere Mike points is any indication. 

There is at least a lot to point at. From what Tim can tell from the snatches of conversation he’s picking up, Mike’s telling Martin about the history of the mountains they’re travelling past, where ancient cities had been built and destroyed. It’s the kind of thing that he’d usually find interesting enough to go over, listen, but he can’t even properly direct his attention to the grey and brown shades of the slopes. It’s stuck like a pin to the place where Mike has a careful hand resting in the small of Martin’s back, to stop him leaning too far out across the rail, and it won’t move.

It rankles, and he doesn’t know why.

Even when he tries to read, study the book that Mike had got out for them to look at, a guide to the beasts of the upper reaches, he can’t focus on it – it just stays flopped open on his lap, beautifully illuminated animals staring out of the page in Martin’s direction.

That’s why he sees it, in the end. Maybe he shouldn’t, isn’t meant to – when he tries to count the seconds, it’s only a small moment, there and then gone, for all that it doesn’t feel like one. For him, it seems to sit in a place where time doesn’t matter, and it can all take as long as it needs to.

In perfect focus, Mike pauses, considers something – perhaps the play of the sunlight across Martin’s face, the way that it catches in his eyes and hair, glinting in new, brighter colours. They’re already so close, and it clearly only takes the merest touch to the back of Martin’s neck to guide him down into the kiss. It’s a gentle brush of lips, and then a lean to deepen it, Mike’s fingers mapping the plane of Martin’s cheek like he wants to learn it as he had the mountains. They stay there, even after both of them have pulled back, lingering gazes and contact and all of it’s enough to turn Tim’s stomach.

Maybe they would have stayed there forever, the three of them trapped as if in crystal, Tim’s end cracking across, but there’s a shout from the rigging, and it’s enough to shatter his still. He bolts to his feet, closing the book with an audible snap, and stalks away without a word. Climbs below decks, feels everything fall neatly and cruelly into place with the hatch above him.

He’s barely been alone in Mike’s cabin for thirty seconds before there’s a knock at the door, hesitant and soft.

“Go away,” Tim says, flat and monotone, with no idea of whether or not it’s loud enough for them to hear on the other side.

The door opens anyway, closes with a quiet click of latch.

“Tim?” Martin’s voice, because of course it is. He should have expected the intrusion, he thinks, sourly – they usually try to get out of the way whenever Mike has to do work on deck, and it’s not as if there’s really anywhere else for him to go. “Are you all right?”

“Not particularly,” Tim says, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed – _fuck_ , the bed, how long before they’re going to start using _that_ for other purposes? What’ll he do, then? Find his way to some other cabin where he won’t disturb them? Shiver on his own out on deck? Or maybe he’ll just have to watch that, too. “Have you completely lost your mind, Martin?”

“I…” Martin takes a step closer, then stops, utterly uncertain. “What?”

“You,” Tim says, the clarification so sharp it feels like he’s spitting thorns. “And him. You kissed right in the middle of the deck, Martin, I hardly think it’s unreasonable of me to have noticed.”

“What?” Martin repeats, still baffled, but the tone almost seems to lighten as he goes on, like there’s laughter trying to edge into it. It’s enough to make Tim’s hands curl into firsts, tight over the knuckles. “What… what makes that your business?”

“Maybe the fact that I’m here too?” he growls. “Or had you forgotten that? I’m afraid I don’t have a choice, what with us being his prisoners and all.”

“I don’t think that he thinks–”

“Not let us go, though, has he?” Tim prods, stares fixedly at his hands as he digs his fingernails into his palms. “So you’re just going to be his captive lover?”

“It’s not _like that_ ,” Martin insists, and he starts coming closer again, a rustle of cloth as he folds his arms. “I don’t–”

“What, you don’t _love_ him?” Tim lets out a short, bitter laugh. “Could have fooled me.”

“I cannot believe you’re _jealous_!” It bursts out of Martin in a rush of air, almost all levity, and Tim hates it, hates that he can’t just deny it. He could have done ten minutes ago, would even have believed it himself. “I know you think he’s hot, if I’d known you wanted to–”

“It doesn’t _matter_ whether or not he’s hot!” Tim snaps, shifts away as Martin takes a seat on the bed beside him, busies himself doing that so he doesn’t have to feel quite so hard the curl of hot resentment that Martin thinks it’s _him_ he’s jealous of. “I thought you were in love with Jon, anyway.”

“Jon’s got nothing to do with this.” The amusement is gone now, Martin’s response quick and defensive, like it always is where Jon’s concerned. “Besides, he’s…”

“Not here?” Tim fills in, vitriol dripping off it. “So he doesn’t matter to you, then? I thought you were all about poetry and love over great distances.”

“Of course he matters to me!” Martin takes a moment, breathes, and Tim tries not to take savage satisfaction in that. “Just because I might be feeling… some things? For Mike, it doesn’t mean that the way I feel about Jon has just gone away. I miss him so much, and – and Mike likes me, and I like him, and I don’t understand why that bothers _you_ so much, because if you were interested in him you could just–”

“You’re his _prisoner_ , Martin,” Tim repeats, for all that he doesn’t really believe it, and it’s easy to layer the words with spines. “Would you really feel comfortable breaking things off with him, if it came to it? Can you honestly say that how easily he could kill us both would not be a factor in that?”

“You know that’s not true,” Martin says, and Tim feels him looking, _scrutinising_. It’s like it lays him open, and he wants to twitch and snarl again like a cornered fox. “Just tell me what it is, Tim.”

“Well,” Tim says, shrugs with one, angry shoulder, and can tell that he’s going to regret it all later. Still can’t stop it from spilling out of him like acid. “I just thought that maybe if you were going to fall in deeply fucked-up love with _anyone_ around here, it – ugh.”

“What?” There’s no judgement there. Not yet. Just curiosity, a need to understand.

“I just don’t understand how you could possibly have got this far without noticing I’m in love with you, all right?” Maybe it’s not fair – he’s barely noticed himself, maybe wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for watching him kiss another man, but now that he has he can feel the thread of it running back through _years_ of knowing him.

Tim finally risks a glance at him, ready to see rejection, refusal, because Martin’s a long-term kind of man and Tim’s always had a life measured in months. Martin’s only ever seen him flirt, have brief pan-flash relationships that fade and take little of him with them when they go, whether because they were all friendship anyway or because they didn’t mean anything in the first place. Before the museum, there had been nothing stable in his life and no point trying to build anything because the wind takes everything, in the end. But then there had been Martin and Jon and Sasha and even now that they’re lost, they’re lost together.

That’s far more than he can expect Martin to glean from one wretched, raw confession.

Martin just blinks, like he’s having to recalibrate his entire worldview.

“You what?” he says, finally, and the question inflection has seeped through all of it, made his words into unreliable ground.

“Don’t make me say it again.” Tim shuffles to turn away again, closes his eyes against the sting and studies intently the afterimage of the window on his lids. It’s not like he’d expected anything else, after all. “It’s humiliating enough as it is.”

“ _What_?” Now, there’s anger, simmering through it, hot enough to burn. “I don’t – is that what you think of me?”

Tim flinches, forces himself to look back, meet that glare with one of his own, for all that he feels laid open to the bone.

“It’s not _you_ ,” he manages, around the swell in his throat. “You’re… you’re great. It’s pathetic of _me_. Keep getting told I could have anyone, and then I go and fall in love with you, who couldn’t be any more obviously head over heels for Jon, and now this.”

“I thought you and Sasha…?”

“Once.” Tim takes a moment with the memory, bright lights and too much alcohol and shaded festival avenues. “Didn’t work out, decided we were better as friends, all going great.”

“Oh.” Martin hesitates, and the defensiveness is gone, at least, though it just gives way to more of that uncertainty, nothing in his manner that Tim can properly read. “Good?”

“ _Good_ ,” Tim echoes, sighs, hard and despairing. “I’m bearing my soul here, Martin, you can do better than that.”

“I don’t think I can?” Martin pauses, and Tim can hear him picking at the thread of his sleeves. “I mean – fuck, Tim, what on earth do you see in me?”

“What?”

“Well, it’s like you said.” Martin tips his head, eyes down, trying too hard to be irreverent. “You could have anyone. So… I just kind of assumed that was never going to be me? I mean, you’re so… and I’m just…” He gives a helpless, abortive gesture, and trails off.

Tim reorients himself, more precisely than he needs to, to face Martin, properly. He seems half-worried, now, pouring too much focus into his anxious habits, and there’s an occasional faint flickering from his gaze as he stops himself from looking at Tim.

“So… just to check,” Tim says, slowly, as clearly as he can make it. “Your feelings on you and me are… you do, then?”

“Yeah,” Martin says. “That must make me sound–”

“Don’t really care how it makes you sound, to be honest,” Tim interrupts, and he can feel a smile of his own fighting to get out, finally, the relief of a break in the cloud cover. “You’re sure Mike wouldn’t mind?”

“He quite likes you too, really–”

Tim doesn’t let him finish the sentence. Just closes the distance between them, drags Martin into a kiss of his own, and it’s nothing like Mike’s had been, nothing tentative or testing. A press of parting lips, a soft gasp that could have been from either one of them, and then peace. Tim touches, runs his hands over Martin’s face and through his hair, exploring even as Martin shifts to hold him steady, and it feels _right_. Certain. He’s with the person he loves, and he doesn’t care if he can taste anyone else on his tongue.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the art in this chapter contains depictions of blood.

Jon hardly notices when his nose starts to bleed. The here and now is something distant, unimportant – he’s caught up in elsewhere, elsewhen, speaking aloud at a fraction of the depth he remembers and feels. He’s utterly disconnected with the sights and sensations of Elias’ cabin, while the sensations of the past magnify, spread through his consciousness like ink through water.

It’s another quiet evening at the museum, and he almost hates that. He should have more memories of them outside work than he can count on his hands. Instead he’d just stuck to his books and frowned at the noise of it if they came back late, exaggeratedly hushed giggling echoing off the walls.

Sasha had been out, that night, in the next town over having a meal with a prospective new romantic interest that she refused to talk about beyond admitting that. Tim had been bemoaning it, along with the fact that he wasn’t in a similar situation, for all that he’d essentially been sitting on Martin’s desk. Ostensibly, he’d been there to hand him brushes and things as Martin fussed over one of his creatures, but they were nothing that Martin couldn’t have reached himself. And besides, by then even Jon had noticed the way that Tim looked at Martin between sentences, the kind of fond affection that he’s seen in the faces of people who’d been married for years.

As far as Jon could tell, Tim had never acted on it – might not even have known himself, had never been exactly subtle with his romances when he had – and he’d been glad of that, in a spiteful, irritated kind of way. Felt too hot every time that he noticed it, and that night it had set him turning the pages of his book without reading them. He’d thought it wasn’t professional, that it was the kind of thing that would end in disaster and him having to hire someone new just to escape the growing chasm of resentment through his team, and though there were some days when he would’ve gladly parted with Martin, even then it would have been more hassle than it was worth to rehome all his creatures.

He wishes he’d paid more attention, now. Looked at them, instead of glaring fixedly through the printed words in his book with his jaw tight enough to make his teeth ache. Maybe then he might have caught things – a shy smile at the edge of Martin’s lips, Tim’s fingertips brushing against his hand, a moment where their faces might have been close enough to kiss. Anything to ease the hollowness in his chest that comes with the surety that they never did before they were taken, that there’s any small happiness they might have missed out on.

When he gets them back, he thinks, he’ll find a way to tell them. He doesn’t want any more touches that never connected, not for them.

Now, all he has is the ache that comes with the memory of the warmth in Tim’s voice, belying whatever he said about better offers. His mind sticks against the things Tim hadn’t said, scratches at them like restless fingers at a scab, and as he tries to follow the thread of them, find what they might have been in his own voice, he feels a light, smooth touch against his lip.

It breaks the fragile scene like a hammer into stained glass. He brushes at it with his fingers as if trying to knock away an insect, but they come away scarlet. Flinching, he cups his hand against the blood, trying to stop any drips from spoiling Elias’ desk, but it runs across his palm and starts to trickle down his wrist, a couple of droplets falling down onto the wood anyway.

“Sorry,” he says, rummaging about in his pockets with his free hand for anything that he might be able to use as a handkerchief, and knowing there’s nothing there like that. “This never happens, I don’t know why it’s– Do you have anything…?”

“It’s quite normal,” Elias says, smoothly. He doesn’t move, just sits and watches as Jon bleeds.

Jon dabs at his nose with his sleeve, but all he manages to do is smear it across his face, staining the material.

“We have been pushing things rather hard,” Elias goes on. “Overdoing it, perhaps, but I imagine if I had tried to warn you, you would have insisted anyway – I know you are having some difficulties with our current levels of progress. If it’s any consolation, you should have experienced these symptoms far earlier. It’s a good sign.”

Jon bites his tongue to stop himself from disagreeing aloud. He can feel the blood drying between his fingers, tacky and tepid.

“You’re progressing,” Elias says. He leans back in his chair, and pulls open one of his desk drawers. “And it’s taken until now for the magic to take a toll. You have an aptitude for it.” He retrieves another of his boxes, and sets it down, takes out another of those carved-eye stones, this one dark and inlaid with gold. “Try with this one?”

Jon takes his hand away from his nose and pauses, letting the blood run where it will. When Elias doesn’t react, he reaches across for the stone.

“How is this one any different from the last one?” he asks. It looks more expensive, but that’s about the only thing that he can discern aside from the more obvious variation in appearance. Feels heavier, perhaps, but he couldn’t say for certain.

“It’s not.” Elias blinks, but his face doesn’t move beyond that, betrays no emotion. “But I find that it has helped some of my previous pupils to have a tangible indication that their abilities are increasing, especially if they’ve grown used to a pattern, as I feel you may have. I suggest that you try again.”

Jon brings the stone in close to his body, and stares down it. Imagines again, unbidden, hurling it against the floor, making it shatter into skittering shards that will crunch beneath his boots as he leaves.

Instead, he smooths his fingers over it, and cannot see if he’s leaving more blood smears there. He closes his eyes, struggling to shut out the sensation of more trickling from his nose, and drags Tim and Martin’s names across his mind again. It feels like he does nothing else with it – even when he’s not offering them up for Elias’ magic, he’s pulling them up for himself. It’s a scant comfort compared to the pain of their absence, but it’s better than nothing. Sometimes, it feels like he’s going to use them all up, and he hates that, too. Tells himself that he can’t run out, because he’s going to find them, and then there’ll be more memories with no regret in them, but it’s not something that he can ever feel as sure about as he pretends to in his letters to Sasha.

Idly, he picks a morning, when he’d gone into their common room to find Tim and Martin still on the chair where he’d left them the previous night, only at some point they’d shifted and tucked themselves in against each other. He’d almost snapped something to wake them, but had instead just given the fireplace a poke and left, quietly closing the door behind him.

When he tries to picture their faces, something else fills in around them that’s not the familiar tones of the museum. Instead, their background is traced in blue gradients, so intense above them that it almost seems to burn. There’s a faint line of cloud, drifting somewhere behind Tim.

Their expressions are as he’d formed them, blank and peaceful with sleep, and when he tries to see them better, the whole thing shatters, falling away into a vague nothing that he can’t scrabble the image back from.

“There,” Elias says. He pushes something over the desk that Jon takes a long moment to recognise as a handkerchief. He snatches it up, holds it against his face, and tries not to breathe into it too hard. “I’m sure eventually you’ll be able to do that without the use of aids. What did you see?”

“They’re together,” Jon says, the words scraping in a throat that’s far too dry. “And they’re – there’s sky. But there’s sky everywhere. So that’s not exactly _helpful_.”

“It tells us that they’re still not being kept in cages below decks,” Elias tells him. “Which is unusual, for the Stranger. It’s possible that they’re no longer with the ship that took them, or perhaps it never was the Stranger, though from the witness descriptions from your village that seemed fairly clear.”

“Can we go on?” Jon squeezes at the stone, as if he can wring the information he needs directly from it. “Maybe we’ll be able to tell–”

“I think perhaps we’ve gone far enough for tonight,” Elias comments, arching an eyebrow and indicating the place where the blood is still welling against Jon’s fingers, past his best efforts with the handkerchief. “You can keep that.”

“Thank you,” Jon mumbles, shifting the angle of the cloth and muffling the words in the process. “Do you want me to clean this up?” He gestures to the few red marks on the desk, but Elias shakes his head.

“I think if you try, it’ll just make it worse,” he says. “Go and rest, Jon. I know you want to find them, but believe me when I tell you that we are already directing all the resources possible towards this. Recover yourself. This is truly excellent progress – we will try again tomorrow.”

"Right," Jon says. He stands, presses the handkerchief awkwardly over his mouth and deposits the stone with a clatter as he does. "Well – thank you, I suppose."

“My pleasure.” Elias smiles, reaches over to pick it out of the blood. “I’m sure we’ll be able to reunite you with them soon.”

Jon nods, and backs out of the office, struggles his way through the corridors holding the wad of fabric to his face. That smile stays with him all the way, and he hates that it feels more tangible than Tim’s and Martin’s in his mind.

He dreams it, all through the night.

* * *

The discomfort should have been done. Over with. Martin cares for him, enough to kiss him back when he does, and that was supposed to be enough to quell the rest of it. Let Tim find solace, rest. Finally accept that he and Martin are not in the danger that they were.

It had been, at first. It doesn’t make his throat itch anymore to see Mike touch him, no longer any reason for him to feel jealousy.

This, though. This is something new, and Tim isn’t quite sure where it had started. He lounges in the desk chair in Mike’s cabin, book open on his lap though he’s not reading it, and tries to stay where he is like he’s not feeling a sensation like thorns digging into his back.

Martin is perched on the edge of the bed, hands raised with a strange configuration of threads wrapped around them, and Mike is kneeling behind him, occasionally reaching around to adjust his hold. He has that almost charged excitement to him again, as he had when he’d shown them the stars, and there’s no indication there that what he’s doing might be dangerous in the slightest. Tim tries to drown his thoughts out with it, but he can’t quite manage it.

“There,” Mike says, so soft that it’s almost reverent. “That’s better.”

“I’m still not sure exactly what I’m supposed to be doing,” Martin says. “I thought you were going to show me…?”

“At the moment you’re just getting the hang of the thread.” Mike inclines his head, and kisses briefly at the back of Martin’s neck, leaves his face resting against the skin there. “You don’t want to be dropping it. The rest will come, if you want it to.”

Martin hums, and adjusts his arm slightly, as if he’s trying to get it more comfortable – Mike immediately reaches around to correct it, and this time at the brush of his lips over Martin’s spine, Tim shivers like it was his own.

“You don’t need to get too caught up in it,” Mike adds, barely above a murmur. “In the end, it’s not about the thread.”

“You said to be aware of it,” Martin reminds him, and while it’s not the shrillest squawk of indignation Tim has heard from him, there’s still enough protest in it to change the pitch.

“Sorry.” Mike gives a half-shrug, and then leans over to lay his hands over Martin’s, his chest pressed against Martin’s back. “I’m not the best teacher – Simon was far better. He made it really fun.” He gently pulls at the threads, finding new patterns in them and stretching them across. As he does so, Tim can make out a faint warping in the space between his fingers, the air distorting. “It’s a… metaphor, I suppose? Something to help you see.” He gently shifts Martin’s hands, and the light there plays oddly against where the shadows should be. “Just finding the vastness in a smaller space. We’ll get to storms later.”

Tim scarcely manages to cover a wince. Storms don’t sound like the kind of thing that they should be going anywhere _near_. None of this does. Martin had asked, yes, curious about Mike in a way that Tim’s sure is only natural, but he hadn’t expected Martin to agree when Mike had awkwardly said that it wasn’t something he could really explain, but that he could probably show them.

Jon wouldn’t have liked it either. Ever since the vase he’d reacted badly the moment Martin had so much as looked at something that he thought might be magic, and Tim misses the surety he would have used to say so. He’d always been snappier about it than he needed to be, but Tim had understood where that was coming from, felt the same fears himself.

At least, the moment that Mike drops his hands, in favour of moving his lips over Martin’s neck with a little more intention, the odd shifting of the space snaps away into nothing. Martin sighs, leans back into him, tips his head back to let Mike’s fingers trace around and up his throat to his jaw.

“I’m hardly going to learn anything with you doing that,” he says, but makes no move to stop it.

“There’s no rush,” Mike tells him, and smiles in a way that Tim’s sure Martin must be able to feel against his skin. His eyes flicker up to meet Tim’s, and he blinks in what might be intended as a friendly gesture. “Are you sure you don’t want to learn too?”

“Quite sure.” Tim folds the book closed, and sets it down carefully on the desk. Doesn’t rush the movements as he stands up, tries to make sure that it looks natural, and not like he’s hurrying to obey some internal voice that sounds like Jon and tells him not to let it get too far. “No to the magic.” He moves over to the bed, nudging Martin’s knees wide to make enough room for him to kiss him, trapping the cradle of thread between their chests. Martin doesn’t seem to mind the distraction – he shifts into it, warm and content. Tim strokes his hand around through Martin’s hair, lets it settle on the nape of his neck, and sighs at the feel of it when Mike’s lips find his fingers. He stays there a moment, then breaks the contact and steps in even nearer, makes sure he’s pressed in as close as possible. “This, I could be convinced.”

The horizon dips, and Tim, for one confused, disorienting second, is falling – it clears a heartbeat later, and he finds himself lying over Martin, like they’d both overbalanced. He rolls sideways enough to crane around at Mike, who sits over them, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Consider the distance between things,” he says, before Tim can find the voice to accuse him of not playing fair. “If you were an insect, you would find it far greater than you do now – and when you fly this high, it’s easy enough to understand that it’s all just a trick of perspective.” He leans down to test the hollow of Martin’s throat with his teeth, and Tim thinks that he sees the slightest flicker of that same wavering between the threads, before it collapses out again. “There are ships in this sky that might sail forever and never find port. No sign of land. Imagine – just you, and the sky, and the ocean an impossible fall below. You could find that, in the thread.”

“Does this have any practical applications?” Tim reaches for Mike’s arm, trying to distract his attention, from the magic more than from Martin.

“Practicality is overrated.” Mike gives a cool touch against his wrist, enough to make his blood want to stutter in his veins. “But I’m sure that everything will have a use somewhere, in the right circumstances.”

“Sure.” Tim affects as much idleness as he can, and plucks the thread from Martin’s hands, tucks it into his pockets and then goes to play with the buttons of his shirt. “In the meantime, we do have something important to be getting on with. Don’t you think?”

Mike half nods, but just straightens up again, standing away from the bed and taking a moment to adjust his clothes.

“As much as I would love to stay,” he says. “Harriet wanted me to take a look at some of our inventories. We’ll be coming to port in a few days, and we need to determine what resources we’ll need to trade for, and what we can give up.” He lets a smile creep out, and then freezes it away again. “I’ll be back later.”

“Lock the door behind you?” Tim suggests – he considers trying to kiss him goodbye, but Mike isn’t near enough, and he doesn’t want to go so far from Martin.

There’s no response, but he hears the click of the door and the turn of the key, and that’s enough – he casts another glance over Martin, and notes a faint glaze to his eyes.

“You all right?” he asks, tipping Martin’s face back towards him, and tries not to feel too relieved when the focus swims back into his expression. “I’ve heard that the magic – it can feel a lot.”

“Bit dizzy,” Martin admits. “But Mike did say to expect that.” He gives a short laugh that makes Tim feel no better at all. “The Vast does like its falling sensations.”

“Do you want to stop?”

Martin doesn’t answer, just pulls Tim down over him again, kisses him with a determination that Tim supposes is the only response he needs. He lets Martin deepen it, guides Martin’s uncertain hands to unfasten his clothes. When he breaks it off to breathe, Martin’s hazy again, but this time it’s centred on Tim, his pupils blown and his touch far surer. Martin’s here, with him, has thoughts nowhere else.

They take their time undressing each other, because they have it. Nothing desperate or hurried about it, and Tim appreciates that, wants to take the time to properly memorise the marks across his skin, the sounds that he makes when Tim kisses his way down his neck. Martin seems relaxed about it, actually accepts that Tim wants to be with him.

It doesn’t feel like what Tim’s been allowing himself, a flash and whirl of romance and lust and then done, just a few days of appreciating each other’s company. It doesn’t feel like an ending, and it’s good. They’re good. So is Mike, for all that Tim’s still not entirely sure of him, in the part of his mind that speaks suspicion like Jon would. Maybe it’s that he’s just as seductive as that path of stars, but he’s constant as the sky, with no regard for the sidelong glances of his crew. Tim’s sure he wouldn’t miss him too badly if his interest did change, but for the moment he’s content to engage with him.

He just hopes that it doesn’t leave too deep a mark on Martin.

* * *

Jon can’t get the blood off his face. He thinks he has, at first, dabs it off his chin and mouth and opens his shirt to make a start on the trails it’s left down his throat, but as he does he finds more droplets falling onto the back of his hand. It doesn’t stop, even after he’s sure he’s been at it for hours, has changed out his pitcher of water twice and taken a plate from the mess to use the polished back as a makeshift mirror.

It’s not a steady flow, and he hopes that that means it’s stopping. Folds himself a new wad of handkerchief from scraps of fabric he’s found in his bag, and grimaces at the idea that if those end up saturated too, he’ll need to go and ask if anyone else on the crew has anything they can give him.

“He got you to go too far.”

The voice is soft, comes from his doorway – he’d left it ajar while he’d been carrying water in, with both hands to avoid slopping it over the floor. He recognises Melanie even without turning, feels his shoulders tense – it’s not a good time for them to retread that familiar argument. But she steps inside anyway, closes the door carefully behind her.

“I thought I told you to leave me alone,” Jon says. The force of it is lost somewhere in his wad of fabric, and he turns to try and glare instead, but if Melanie’s perturbed by it at all, she doesn’t show it. All that’s on her face is something that looks like it might once have met regret, or sympathy.

“The same thing happened to me,” she tells him, and gestures for him to sit. “You need to rest for a while, and try to stop thinking about it. It’s like any injury. The bleeding will stop if you just leave it alone.”

“I can’t stop thinking about them.” The words spill out of him instead of another snapping, snarling insistence that she leave, and he finds himself going where he’s pointed, following her indications of where he’s missed spots of blood. “They’re my – my friends. I won’t lose them.”

Melanie shifts, slightly, and he can tell that she has comments to make about that, but instead she just pushes her lips into a thin line.

“When did you last eat something?” she asks, instead.

“Dinner.”

“You ate two bites and then left your plate in the mess,” Melanie reminds him, and it’s at least not as scathing as it could be, just flat and factual. “I saw you.”

“I wasn’t hungry.” He still can’t seem to quash the unsettled stomach he has ahead of his sessions with Elias, though he tells himself that it’s anticipation, not fear. It’s a poor excuse, though, and Melanie scoffs.

“You need to take this seriously,” she says. “Doing what Elias wants – it’s going to make you sick. It’s already doing it, and if you keep down that path, it’ll get worse. By the time it doesn’t make you sick anymore, you won’t want to stop – and it won’t be about your friends anymore. You won’t be you.”

“I don’t care what I become.” Jon wipes another line of dried blood from his throat, feels it flake against his fingers. “If I can save them–”

“Don’t you think they might care?” Melanie tries, ducking her head to try to keep eye contact with him. “You’ve come all this way for them – don’t you think you matter to them, too? Wouldn’t they rather you stayed you?”

“They’ll have each other,” Jon says, more roughly than he means to. “They’ll cope, if I can just get them _safe_ –”

“What if they’re already dead?”

“No.” Jon snaps it, the word coming out with the speed and force of a snake’s strike. He lets his cloth fall, just bleeds at her. “No. They’re alive. I saw them.”

“You did, did you?” Melanie studies him, blinks like she’s reassessing her estimation of how deep into this he is. “How do you know you weren’t just seeing what he wanted you to? He can put stuff in your head, you know.”

“I don’t _care_.” Jon pushes himself to his feet again, snarls out the words in a way that he can feel billowing the blood at his lips. “They might be. They might _not_ be, and if they aren’t – if doesn’t matter how small the chance is that Elias is telling the truth. I have to take it. If I choose to believe you instead – I could be letting them die. Maybe you’ve never cared about anyone, and can’t quite understand what I’m feeling here. These are people that I _love_. Do you really expect me to throw away any chance of ever seeing them again, on the off-chance that Elias is working solely for some other interest?”

“It’s more than an _off-chance_!” Melanie pauses, takes a second to control her voice, though it clearly costs her to do so. Perhaps she thinks she’ll get further if she goes softly, but it doesn’t matter how gently she words any of it. “I’ve seen it happen before. I _told_ you. Even if they are out there, he won’t get you to them, he’s just leading you on–”

“I think you should leave,” Jon interjects, forcing his own anger down into something cold and solid. “If you’re going to stab me, you can go ahead and do it.”

“Fine, fine.” Melanie backs towards the door, but doesn’t turn away from him, makes it clear enough that she means to get in a few parting shots. “I hope it’ll be enough to feel that your conscience is clear, once Elias keelhauls the rest of us. Your friends are already lost. There are people here you can help, and people Elias will hurt in the future that you can help.”

“I can help _them_ ,” Jon insists, and Melanie grits her teeth, stuffs her hands deep into her pockets like she’s trying to stop herself from shaking him.

“For someone who’s supposed to have a talent for the Eye,” she grinds out. “You’re one of the blindest people I’ve ever met.”

“Melanie,” Jon says. “Is there anything – anything at _all_ – that you can tell me to prove beyond doubt that they’re dead? Or can you promise me that you’ll help me find them, once we’ve done whatever you want to to Elias?”

“No,” she admits, and takes another step away, something angry glinting in her eyes. “Only because I have the decency not to lie to you about it.”

“Well maybe you should!” Jon stalks past her, yanks his door open for her. He can feel that there’s more blood, carving patterns down the sides of his throat, and he can’t bring himself to care. “There’s nothing else you could do to convince me.”

Melanie strides out, pauses just past the threshold, and glances back at him over one shoulder.

“I hope those little snatches of feeling you’re getting are worth it,” she says, and there’s almost no anger in it now, just more of that almost-sympathy. “Because that’s all you’re going to get.”

She walks away before he can spit anything after her, and he hunches back to his basin, making sure to lock his door this time. He dips his makeshift handkerchief into it, watching as small drifts of red coil out from it, and then scrubs it hard across his face. The water runs down his neck, along under his shirt, and he grimaces at the sensation. Reaches, almost reflexively, for the same threads of memory that he does with Elias. After all, Elias had said that he stones were just there to help him focus, that he should be able to do it without them.

Maybe he can just find them himself, then be rid of Elias and Melanie and all of it.

He tries and tries, but nothing seems to fall into place for him, and he has to breathe through his mouth when his nose fills. Dredges up memories with no promise of a future, tries to find new details in the ones he’s studied before. Martin, bottlefeeding some abandoned puppies. Tim, watching. Him, watching too, but somehow not noticing that he is, because he’s somehow removed from the scene in a way that he would never consider Tim.

All he manages to do is remind himself that it _is_ worth it, no matter what Melanie says. He needs them to be okay. They need each other. They’ll survive without him.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s easy enough to be content. Martin has no reason to try to be any other way. He lies there, his head pillowed on the easy warmth of Tim’s shoulder, Tim’s fingers gently and rhythmically stroking through his hair, and he never wants to move again. Just to accept his place, stay there, let the world fossilise around him. It’s drifting slowly into evening now, and he’s sure that once it’s dark enough, they’ll want to go and look at the stars again, but he imagines that if they put out all the lights and stay together on the bed, they’ll be able to see them through the windows. It wouldn’t be the same, but he doubts it would be nothing.

Mike wouldn’t join them. He’ll stay out on deck, unless there’s something he wants them to see, in which case he’ll come and get them, but he never seems to spend the night. Always gone by morning, and he’s still distant even when he’s close enough that Martin could believe for a second that he might know him.

It’s a strange thing. He knows what he feels for Mike has been sudden, a plummet rather than the plant-slow growth of warmth that he associates with Jon and Tim. Different, but it still seems right to kiss him, like there’s nothing else that he could do. It’s the idea of the wind in his hair, the sense of grasping at the void, or of letting go completely and allowing it to take him.

Whatever it ends up being, it’s still so much better than that tiny prison on the Stranger ship, and he doesn’t want to scrutinise it too hard, lest it burst like a soap bubble and abandon him there again.

At some point, Tim stops moving. His hand still rests against Martin’s hair, but there’s a fixed kind of thoughtfulness to him that Martin has seen a lot of, lately, since they’d come aboard Mike’s ship and there had been space for anything other than terror. 

“What is it?” Martin asks, his voice soft and round-edged with afterglow.

“Mike said we were going to stop in port,” Tim says, and there’s at least no reluctance to it, the way there had been when he felt that Martin might argue with him. “Do you think… could we go?”

Martin leans a little further away from Tim, trying to get a better look at his face, and Tim adjusts, almost unconsciously, to let him, while still keeping as close as possible. He’s not hostile, not upset, just running the possibilities.

“Do you even want to?” he goes on, and he doesn’t meet Martin’s eyes, gazing up towards the painted stars on the ceiling. “I mean, I know you like him–”

“I seem to remember you kissing him too,” Martin comments, but Tim just waves one hand like that’s beside the point. “But, yes – I want to go home. Of course I do. We need to get back to Jon and Sasha, and the museum.”

“But do you think Mike would be okay with that?” Tim prods, and now he glances sideways, might as well not have done – his expression is so caught up on the problem that he can hardly read it. “Us leaving. I know he doesn’t lock us in but… he wouldn’t need to. It’s not like we’ve had anywhere to go.”

“I think he would,” Martin says, with an awkward, one-shouldered shrug. “He’s not shown any interest in forcing us to stay, though I’ve not really talked to him about it, about what he sees happening with us.”

“So long as he’s not still planning to turn us over to the Stranger,” Tim mutters, and Martin sighs, scrabbles about for Tim’s hand to squeeze it.

“He’s not mentioned the Stranger to me since he first picked us up,” he says. “When he talks about the future, it’s all… things he wants to show us, and then today about Vast magic. That kind of thing. I don’t think he’d do it?”

“You’re sure about that?”

Martin shoots a narrow-eyed glance sideways, and knows that Tim picks up on it.

“Oddly enough, Tim,” he says. “Trading us to monsters who might skin me and have some mysterious, probably evil fate in mind for you is not something I really look for in a partner.”

“So you do discern, then?” Tim mutters, tips Martin a smile to take the sting out of it, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, like he’s just going through the motions of joking.

Martin does the same with his glare, utterly without heat, but he doesn’t hold it, just lets his face soften and then subsides onto Tim’s shoulder again.

“I’ve got you, haven’t I?” he murmurs.

“That’s not a pattern,” Tim tells him, still light about it. “I know I’m the best choice around, clearly, but then there’s Jon…”

“Jon’s fine!” Martin swats half-heartedly at his arm, somehow manages to miss by inches despite their proximity. “And besides, he’d never…” 

“He would, he doesn’t shut up about you.” Tim cranes his neck around to kiss Martin’s hair, and Martin closes his eyes, tries to find that place of warmth again.

“None of it’s good, though, is it?” he says, and tries to keep the bitterness out of it, isn’t sure that he quite manages.

“Well, that’s Jon for you,” Tim says. “But I really think he cares back – the way he looks at you? Look it’s something we’ll talk about when we see him again.” He laces his fingers more comfortably with Martin’s, and studies them. “You’ve got me, though. No matter what.”

“And you’re the best one,” Martin fills in.

“Naturally.” Tim taps Martin’s knuckle with his thumb, like he’s trying to make sure that the comfort had come through along with the jokes. “So… not planning on bringing Mike home to meet Sasha, then?”

“I don’t think he’d like Larkrest,” Martin admits, finds it easier to keep steady than he had thought he would. It’s not something that he’s spoken about with Mike – he doesn’t think he needs to, already knows what the answers would be, has seen them in the way he looks when he shows them the stars. “It’s our home, and his is out here.”

“So you would leave with me?” It sounds too off-hand, like Tim’s trying to project that he knows the answer, doesn’t need to doubt it, but Martin knows he wouldn’t ask if he didn’t need to just check.

“Of course I’d come with you,” Martin says. It’s not a question that he begrudges, can see him asking it himself. “Although I don’t know how we’re going to get back to Larkrest. We’ve got no money, we’re not equipped to work our way. And we don’t know where else the Stranger might be looking for you. I know it’s not home, but… this might be the safest place for us, right now.”

“We’ll hide,” Tim says. He shifts, so that he can trace his hand across Martin’s cheek, and his tone starts to feel faraway again. “We’ll send a letter to Jon and Sasha, so they know where to find us. In code, or something, so that no one else can read it. They’ll take an obscure route so they won’t be followed.”

“And then?” Martin prompts, half-hoping that he’ll be able to dream it. “Do we all run away together? Jon wouldn’t want to leave the museum.”

“Maybe,” Tim says, and it sounds like his head isn’t in the problem anymore. Sleep, perhaps, starting to blur into his thoughts. “Maybe not.”

“Even if we stay, we should send them a letter from port,” Martin suggests. “I’m sure Mike would be all right with that.”

“We’ll talk to him,” Tim says, but there’s a doubt in him that Martin can feel, when he settles a little more comfortably against his side. It’s between them, now, that uncertainty of future, sitting like a thorn, stabbing through the blankets, and refusing to let either of them be.

* * *

Jon can feel a breeze on his face. There isn’t one there, with him, in the enclosed, dim space of Elias’ cabin. It’s something of another place, and he can feel from the way that it lifts an ache from his chest that it’s good. There’s a phantom weight of a hand in his, an ache in his neck, his mind silent in wonderment, the sensation of height with none of the threat of dashing him against far-below stone.

It’s clean and clear, and he breathes easier with it. _Martin and Tim_ , he thinks, and he can almost hear each name in the other’s voice. They’re together still, he knows, and they are content to be so. Their presences glow in his head, and the warmth of it is enough to make tears well into the corner of his eyes, that sense that they both have the other standing between them and the chill of the night.

There’s a space, he thinks, perhaps, there for him. And while he cannot step into it, is sure they have no way of knowing he’s present, he’s slowly certain that he will, one day. That he’s not going to lose them, not now.

Maybe that’s what gives him the bravery, the surety, to open his mouth and lie to Elias Bouchard.

“It’s different now,” he says, and he lets his voice catch in his throat. It might have done that anyway, buoyed along with the second-hand intensity that flashes in his mind. “I... I think they’re in trouble.”

“Oh?” Elias says, and Jon can hear his chair creaking, as he leans forwards, interested. “Tell me what you see.”

“It’s dark,” Jon says, and that, at least, is not a lie. It’s night, where they are, or they’d have no way to see the stars the way they are – he has a glimpse of them, a reflection of a far-off galaxy over Tim’s gaze, and he feels something fracturing behind his ribs. “They – they can’t move. They’re afraid.”

“Keep going,” Elias says, and his voice is soft as crushed velvet, overflowing with sympathy. “I know it’s unpleasant, but you have to keep looking – it _will_ help us find them.”

“Tim’s bleeding,” Jon says, and he hates it, hates the concept of it, the way that it feels so easily from his mouth and nothing happens. Elias should be able to tell, had taken the truth from his words at the beginning and used it to promise him their lives, was supposed to still be looking, like Jon is. “I can feel it – he’s still trying to reach Martin, but the blood is… sticky. On his hands.”

“What do they see?” Elias asks, so gentle that it makes Jon want to stand, throw the desk down over him. He’s sure he wouldn’t have the strength.

“They don’t,” Jon says, and it’s the strongest point of fiction in the story. They see as close to everything as anyone ever could.

“Right,” Elias says. Jon watches as he smooths a finger across the stones, an affected gesture to make Jon believe he’s actually doing something. “They’re not far. Still travelling, but I think we might be gaining on them. We just have to keep on with this, make sure that we don’t take a wrong turning anywhere.”

“Okay.” Jon hesitates, tries to adopt an expression that’s as wretched as he can manage. It’s too easy. His face has fallen into those shapes for too often, lately. “I… are you sure?”

“I don’t deal in lies, Jon,” Elias tells him. “We’ll catch them, sooner or later. As long as we keep things up on our side.”

“Is there anything more that we can do tonight?” Jon gives his nose a cautious dab, though he can feel that it’s not bleeding. Easy to let Elias believe that he’s checking that he’s able to keep going, even though it’s more that he wants to hide anything that might be showing up in his expression, as one part of his mind tries to make excuses, snarls at him for taking risks with Tim and Martin’s safety, insists that just because they’re feeling comfortable now doesn’t mean they’re going to stay safe until he can reach them.

“I believe on the watching side of things that you would only distress yourself further,” Elias says. “Though I would like to speak to you about the effect that this may be having on you.” He pauses, as if for effect, and Jon gives an impatient gesture, as if he’s ready to hear and dismiss all of the concerns he might have in favour of continuing to throw his psyche at the problem. “We have been doing rather a lot these past few days, and I wanted to warn you that as this goes on, you may start to feel a bit…” He hesitates as if he’s groping for words, but it doesn’t suit the sharpness of his eyes. “Different. You will want to watch more. It will become increasingly important to you, for its own sake. That is to be expected. The magic of this world is temperamental, and it enjoys being flattered. You will find yourself prioritising it over… other things. It may seem alarming, but it is still absolutely what is necessary to find your friends. Once you have them back, I will be able to help you return to the state you were in prior to the magic.”

_You won’t do it, though, will you_ , Jon thinks, remembers what Melanie had said. That Elias would use him up, hold Tim and Martin out in front of him until he is all eyes and no longer cares for them, and still he won’t save them.

“I’ve made my peace with doing whatever I have to,” he says, outwardly. That’s not true, either. What he feels now is far from peaceful. 

Elias lets him take his leave, and he waits until he’s three turns away from the captain’s door before he lets his jaw clench. He crosses the ship, moving through the dark and quiet spaces where no one else seems to pay him any attention, away from his own cabin. For the whole journey, his mind continues to scrabble for possibilities. Maybe, it doesn’t matter what he _said_ , Elias was still sensing the truth of what he’d been feeling and using that as his line to Tim and Martin, more than anything else. But that doesn’t fit with what Elias had told him – it was only Jon’s knowledge of them, that he spoke aloud his memories, that meant Elias could reach for them. It could never have worked if he’d been lying.

So he had, and so had Elias.

He reaches out for them again, in search of another steadying moment of their peace. It comes, though he couldn’t say for certain that it’s a continued connection or just him remembering how it had felt before. But he knows they’re all right. That he’s going to find them, that they’ll be all right together, but that Elias is not the way.

Arriving at his destination, he opens the door, and steps inside without knocking.

“Melanie,” he says, into the dim light beyond. “What do you want me to do?”

* * *

In the end, it’s easiest just to ask. Tim sits on his usual place on the deck, on the steps leading up to the steering column, watching as Martin, settled on the deck against the side, tries to make himself look as unthreatening as possible in an effort to befriend the ship’s cat. It’s a scrawny grey thing with patchy fur, the meanest expression that Tim’s ever seen, and it’s lying on the floor about a metre from Martin, still save for the twitch of a half-chopped tail, watching Martin through narrowed eyes and considering his soft, encouraging noises with contempt.

He’s not looking to have a conversation, but there’s a brief touch at his arm, and when he turns to acknowledge it, Mike’s there. He offers Tim a remote smile, and pauses beside him, leaning against the rail.

“He should be careful,” he says, and indicates Martin with a tip of his head. “That cat’s killed more people than anyone else on board.”

“What?” Tim squints towards the cat again, but it does not magically transmute itself into a tiger. It just flicks one ear as the breeze tugs at it, and still doesn’t deign to move. Martin offers it a hand, limp at the wrist, and it continues to ignore him.

“Simon is malevolent at heart,” Mike tells him, and there’s not even the slightest flicker of a joke in his expression.

“And you just let him stay aboard?”

“Can’t stand to think what he’d do if we tried to get him off,” Mike says mildly, with a half-shrug. “It’s his ship, really.” He clears his throat, inclines himself a little closer to Tim, goes on a bit more quietly. “What’s on your mind? You’ve been thoughtful – if you’re not with him you’re thinking too hard.”

Tim glances up at him, something defensive ready on his lips, but there’s nothing threatening in Mike’s expression, no edge of threat or anticipation of violence if he gives the wrong answer.

“You said we’re making landfall soon,” he ventures, still keeps it neutral, testing.

“Yes,” Mike says, and his tone goes no harsher. “Highwater. It’s a fairly large trading port, very spectacular waterfall that I think you and Martin might like if we have the time. We’re hoping to pick up some more food, but if there’s something specific you want to look for–”

“I was wondering if you’d let us go,” Tim says. Wishes he could bite it back a moment later, but there’s no sudden explosion of temper. He hesitates, glances back towards Martin, still blissfully unaware of the conversation, what might be riding on it. He’s stopped trying to encourage the cat, and is now sitting back with his hands folded in his lap, fiddling with the thread that Mike had given him, which stays looped around his wrist. That, more than anything, seems to have got the cat’s attention, and it has shifted upright, paws tucked neatly under its chest, and watching far more closely. “Once we’ve got there – if we’ll be allowed to leave the ship.” 

Mike blinks.

“Of course,” he says, and it’s a little more guarded than Tim has come to expect from him – it’s not that he plays things close to his chest, usually, so much as that he just has nothing much to display. When he does, he doesn’t seem to care who sees it. “It’s not really a matter of _letting_ – if you want to go, you can, though I have to admit I was rather hoping you might both stay.”

“I…” Tim sighs, glances down at his own empty hands. “Look, I don’t mean to imply that we’ve been having a bad time of things, here. You’ve been… far better than our last captor.”

“I never really thought of myself as your captor,” Mike comments, but it’s not rough, or judging, just a statement.

“Yeah, that’s part of it,” Tim agrees, pulling distractedly at his knuckles. “It’s just – Martin and I didn’t choose to be here.”

“I hoped you might.” Mike seems to be having a little more difficulty with the words now, and when Tim risks a glance, he can see that his eye line has shifted towards Martin. “I thought you’d been finding it pleasant.”

“We have,” Tim says, tries not to rush into it, make it a reassurance. “And I don’t know what we’re going to do, exactly – but we can’t just stay up here in the sky with you forever. We didn’t leave home because we wanted to, didn’t sign on willingly. We were taken. We have people at home who will be worried about us. We have lives there, and we need to go back to them.”

There’s a short silence that seems to stretch out into hours. Tim struggles to discern feeling from it, hurt or anger or acceptance or _anything_ , but Mike simply seems to be considering, without an edge to it of any sort.

“Where is home?” he asks, finally, about when Tim had given up on ever hearing him speak ever again.

“Larkrest.” The sound of it aches in Tim’s throat, and he holds a blink longer than he needs to.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“No reason why you should.” Tim keeps twisting at his fingers, half-fascinated by the bunching of his skin. “It’s very small.”

“Everywhere is,” Mike says, and forces his attention away from Martin, up towards the distant, jagged horizon.

“The nearest town is Birchbridge.” It comes out a little too fast, as he gets onto a subject that he’s surer of. “I can try to point it out on a map for you later, if you have any, but why–” 

“If we’re travelling that way, I could take you,” Mike announces, still without a flicker of anything in his face. “We’ve come a long way since I took you from the Stranger. You have nothing. You won’t be able to pay your way back home, and I don’t think either of you has in-demand skills for ships.”

Tim winces. It’s a clear-eyed enough summary of their situation. He’s done it before, crossed the sky with nothing but his charm and a learned ability to fit himself into cramped spaces, but for all that Martin’s resourceful, it’ll be harder with two.

“How long would that take?” he asks, keeps it uncertain.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Mike admits. “I go where the Fairchilds tell me to. I could try to put in a request, but that’s not something I’ve tried before – I don’t know if they’d look kindly on it. But it’ll be safer than trying to make your way on your own. There are a lot of dangers out here, especially for people like you and Martin.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Just that it’s hard,” Mike says, with a vague gesture which almost seems to be to distract, more than anything else. “Hard. You’re not like that.”

“Maybe not, but we’ll do what we have to–”

“The point is,” Mike interrupts, his voice a little firmer now, pushing to stop Tim from speaking over him. “Of those dangers, I’m among the worst of them. As long as you’re under my protection, you’re under the protection of the Vast. Nothing out here will hurt you. If you want to, you can leave my ship at Highwater with no trouble. I’ll give you what I can and be sad to see you go. Or, you can stay on, and I can get you home, eventually.” 

“Eventually,” Tim echoes.

“Why don’t you talk about it with Martin?” Mike suggests, points, and then follows it himself, lets out a sharp laugh. Tim’s never heard a sound like that from him before. “Well, would you look at that.”

On the other side of the deck, Simon the cat is pushing its face up against Martin’s knee and purring, bright blue eyes half-closed with contentment, as Martin rubs gently at its fur.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the art in this chapter contains depictions of knife violence.

Jon cannot get Eric Delano’s face out of his mind. The worst of it, lingering – the way he’d looked, after they had brought him back on board, torn up and frozen. The question of what had happened to him, since he’d been left ashore – Melanie has no idea, avoids the question when he asks, as if she thinks the fear is going to make him go back on his decision to help her. Maybe she would have been right about that. Too late now, as he sits opposite Elias, spins lies about what he feels from Tim and Martin, and can’t stop seeing that broken man.

He’d been so cold. His hands, crooked and shivering things, blue-toned as his blood had started to freeze. Jon can’t make himself not think about them. That’s what’s coming for him, if he so much as puts a foot wrong in this. Both of them, him and Melanie, over the side, along with whatever other conspirators she might have involved but refused to tell him about, on the off-chance that he ends up spilling it all to Elias.

Part of him had wanted to be offended by that, but it hadn’t won out. Even aside from the possibility of Elias just sifting it all out of his head as easily as he’d separate stones from sand, he knows as well as Melanie does that if it comes down to a choice between them or Tim and Martin he’d choose the latter.

He doesn’t even need to lie about them anymore. Might do better if he didn’t, if he stuck to the truth as much as possible and made himself less likely to be caught in any of it, but he does it anyway. Refuses to give Elias another true breath about them, won’t draw them any deeper into his schemes. The distinction feels important, to him, though he’s sure that Elias wouldn’t care for it at all – the only matter as something to hold above Jon’s head, to make him sit and roll over, and he’s hardly stopped doing his tricks. He still reaches for them, after all, still taking steps down that road to become something he’s sure he’ll never want to be – for all that he’s always been curious, wanted to learn, he refuses to let that be all he is.

So he spins out more nonsense about the dark, about cold bars and not enough space to move, an all-pervading fear that will tell Elias that he’s wretched, that he needs him and whatever faint glimmering hope he can offer to keep him moving. He talks about screaming, about how tightly Tim’s hand is wrapped around Martin’s, flatters Elias with pleading questions about how close they might be, whether he can be sure they’ll get there in time.

All the while, he can sense instead the gentle shift of a ship below them, cruising at an altitude far higher than Elias’, while they remain safe and warm within. He can see the colours of the sunset as they watch it, hear the thrum of the wind in their sails, feel the weight of Martin on the bed next to Tim, close and safe.

It’s an intrusion, he thinks. Something that should belong to them, and then alone, private moments that concern no one else. But it keeps his voice steady, and he tells himself that he’ll apologise for it if he ever finds them again. And besides, he knows that they think of him. He can feel the shape of himself in their minds, from time to time, so clear an echo in Martin’s that he could almost believe him aware of Jon’s presence. It’s a little more fleeting, to Tim, uncertainly grasped, but he’s there all the same, thoughts of him bound to thoughts of Martin so deeply that it’s as if they’ve been tied at the wrists, even over all the distance between them.

“You certainly seem to be coming along,” Elias says, breaking hard into his reverie. He bites back a wince, tries to remember at what point he’d stopped speaking, so as not to repeat himself. “I’ve never known anyone glean this level of sensation from such a distant subject before.”

“I’m very motivated,” Jon tells him, with a tight, irritated shrug. “Elias – it feels like they’re running out of time. Are you any closer to finding out where they are? We’ve been at this for so long and I’ve been trying so hard…”

“It’s not an exact science,” Elias reminds him, and he manages to keep it soft. “If they themselves aren’t aware of where they are, there is only so much that I can do. I’m certain we will reach them eventually. And if it does turn out you’ve had a wasted journey, I will make sure that you’re well compensated for it.”

“There is no _compensation_ ,” Jon snaps, loses his temper faster than he can recognise the brief test for what it is. He bites at his tongue, trying to force the heat to pass, but his rage at Elias has been building for too long to be quickly smothered away to nothing like so many dim embers. “ _Please_.”

“I’m doing everything in my power,” Elias claims, and the lie shows nowhere in his expression. “It’s not as simple as being able to point a finger at a map.”

“I just worry,” Jon says, tries to imply an apology there that he refuses to let pass his lips. “We don’t know what the Stranger wants with them, why they’ve kept them alive for so long.”

“I understand,” Elias says, and there’s something faintly chiding about his tone, perhaps – Jon is half-sure he’s imagining it, just because he feels it should be there. “But perhaps there’s nothing sinister to it – or no more sinister than the Stranger usually is, and we’re simply learning more about how they operate. Don’t you think that’s a good thing?”

“I don’t understand.” It feels like another test, and he can sense that he’s failing it, has no idea how to change that. His throat catches, but he forces himself to breathe past it, like resisting a cough.

“Learning,” Elias says. “You told me that you run a museum, and the Eye works well with you. Doesn’t it feel good, to use it? To reach out with it? Natural?”

“It does.” Jon can’t risk anything more, doesn’t want to open his mouth again in case the insistence that that’s only because he loves what he’s searching for comes spilling out.

“There’s a lot more we could discover,” Elias suggests, leading. “I hope you would consider staying on, after we find your friends – they’ll be very safe on board. We fly under Fairchild’s pennant, at least, so most ships won’t bother us. You’ll be able to continue studying with me to your heart’s content.”

 _The only things that I care to learn_ , Jon thinks, and he’s sure that it’s so loud Elias must be able to hear it. _Are about them_.

“I don’t…” he hesitates, shakes his head, affects as much confusion about his priorities as he can. “They’re the most important thing. I can’t agree to anything else until I know they’re safe. Can we keep trying?”

“Very well,” Elias says, and the only change in his face is the slightest twitch around his eyebrow. Jon has no idea what it could mean. “Although bear in mind that we’re starting to push at the boundaries of what you can do in one night – perhaps prepare yourself for more bleeding. I understand you’re eager to get to your friends, but I’m sure you collapsing won’t do them any good.”

“It doesn’t feel like we’re doing them any good _anyway_ ,” Jon mutters, and that, at least, is painfully true. He’s sure the only reason he’s closer to them now than he would be in Larkrest is that out here he has the means to travel after them.

Elias opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, there’s a distant, heavy crack that seems to reverberate through the entire ship – a gunshot, Jon thinks, or perhaps something going wrong with the engines. The deck trembles below their feet, and one of the delicate boxes that Elias keeps his stones in clatters over, hinges smashing against the floor. There’s a fall of papers from the shelves around them, and through it all there’s a low, pitching feeling in Jon’s stomach, as if they’re no longer flying, but falling.

Elias doesn’t move for what feels like an age, a point of still amidst the rising chaos. Then he twitches, his gaze settling on Jon, and his eyes narrow.

* * *

The ship doesn’t seem like itself anymore. Martin’s grown used to the motion of it high up in the air currents, unsettled only by an occasional shudder of turbulence or press of wind at the hull, knows those feelings for what they are – just a part of the sky, like everything else – and is never unsettled by them.

This isn’t that. There’s a juddering through the whole of the vessel as they pull into port, hauled the last few metres by ropes and hooks, rather than sail, and there’s a crash of the side against the jetty that would have sent him sprawling, if he had tried to stand.

Tim, sitting beside him, tightens his grip on Martin’s hand, as if he feels just as unsteady as Martin does.

“It’s not too late,” he says. “We’ll be here at least an hour. There’s plenty of time for us to decide.”

Martin hums, nods, and tries not to think about it too hard. If he does, he gets lost in the tangle of possibilities, suspended in a net of them where he should be able to fall cleanly, and he hates it. They play on his mind, even when he tries to steer his thoughts away from them.

Mike had spent the night with them. Seemed present, rather than with half an eye on the window. In the soft morning light, before he’d gone to take a last look over their inventories with Harriet, he’d kissed them both, taken his time over it. As he’d been holding Martin’s face, fingers cool and gentle against his skin, he’d quietly asked them not to leave without saying goodbye. Then he’d been gone, left them staring after him, mute and conflicted.

Maybe that should have made it simpler. Choose to stay with him, at least for a little longer, and there’ll be no farewell today. But perhaps that would just make the inevitable parting more difficult. He can’t find it in himself to believe that they’d ever see Mike again – he sees the world in broad strikes of sky, and for all that he might want to visit, it’s too easy to believe that the wind might never take him their way again.

From what they’d been able to tell from Mike’s maps, that don’t bother to mark such small villages, it’s a long, _long_ way back to Larkrest. Especially when they don’t have the money to pay for direct passage, or anything that they’re willing to sell. The best that they could hope for would be to find a small job, perhaps in a tavern, and save enough money after paying for food and lodgings to allow them to fly to the next town, and start the whole thing over again.

It might take them years to get home. 

“We should write that letter to Jon,” Tim says, but he doesn’t make any move towards the desk, towards the sheet of paper that they’ve had there for hours. “Whatever we do.”

He thinks that they’re staying. They’ve not got much, by way of belongings, just the clothes that Mike had found for them, a couple of the books that he’d told them they could keep, but Martin had noticed that when he’d been trying to pack, in case they did decide to go, Tim hadn’t helped. Martin doesn’t know if he should feel anything about that, if they should talk about it – there’s still time for that, he supposes.

It runs out. They get as far as writing Jon’s and Sasha’s names at the top of their letter, and then the pen stops moving.

“We should probably start by telling them we’re alive?” Martin suggests, and Tim huffs something that might once have met a laugh, scratches out an assurance that they’re both safe and well. After that, Martin knows, is supposed to come where they are, what they’re doing to get back. The unmade sentence is heavy in Martin’s head.

They’re saved from the decision by a crash from the other end of the cabin, so utterly unlike what they’re used to that Tim starts, the ink pot spilling over his fingers, staining them. Martin hears him curse, scrabble for some paper to blot it off the desk, but any instinct to help is smothered away by the sight that greets him when he turns.

There’s a woman, standing in the doorway, hard-faced and unfamiliar. Not one of Mike’s crew, but dressed for the sky anyway, in dark, practical clothing that’ll keep the wind chill off, and she considers them through a pair of tinted goggles. A smaller ship, perhaps, that moves faster and needs its crew to be better protected.

“Tim Stoker?” she asks, pulling a cloth mask away from the lower half of her face. “Martin Blackwood?”

“Who wants to know?” Tim demands, standing fast enough that the chair falls behind him – he steps up beside Martin, throwing out an arm as if he intends to push him behind him, but Martin stays solidly where he is. Part stubbornness, perhaps, but he can feel that enough of it is fear, a thick terror that swells into his throat and whispers _no, not this again_.

“You need to come with me,” the woman says, brusque and sharp. “We don’t have a long before the rest of the crew gets back.”

“Actually we’re good here,” Martin tells her, voice spiked and pitching. “So, if you could–”

“Jon Sims sent me,” she adds, taking a step further into the room, hands settling against the holsters around her waist.

“No,” Tim snaps, trying to jostle Martin backwards now, though there’s not much further that they can go before they’ll hit the wall. “No, we can’t accept that. It’s not the first time that something has known our names. We’re staying right here, unless you can _prove_ –”

“We don’t have time for this.” The woman glares, keeps her eyes fixed on them as she snatches something from her belt, and points it straight at them. “Move.”

Martin opens his mouth to refuse, and then he recognises what she’s holding – it’s a pistol, short and snub-nosed, ugly in her grip. From the way that she holds it, Martin doesn’t doubt that she knows how to use it, that she wouldn’t miss.

“All right,” Tim says, and his hand slides into Martin’s, drawing him closer as Tim angles around, trying to get a better view of the gun deck beyond the door, as if he’s checking for the crew. “All right, we’re coming.”

The woman gestures them towards the door, and circles around behind them, keeping a short distance between them. Once they’re ahead, she steps closer, as if she’s trying to use them to obscure any view of the gun.

“Move,” she repeats, and the two of them step out into the space beyond. She forces them towards the hatch, up onto the deck, and Martin tries to catch Tim’s eye, work out what he might be thinking. Can’t, because Tim’s too focussed on the boards ahead, as if he’s looking for some way to get them free.

Once they reach the ladder up, she moves closer, grabs Tim by the arm, and yanks him hard away from Martin, into the wall.

“You first,” she orders, and Tim finally looks at him, just long enough to give him a tiny nod. Telling him to do as she asks, that they’ve got no chance if they try to fight this.

Martin climbs, and as he does, he notices, distractedly, that his hands are shaking. It makes sense, he supposes. The woman is _clearly_ not from Jon. For all that he’d love to believe it, that this is just going to be one unpleasant moment on a journey that will get them both home, Jon wouldn’t intentionally send anyone who would threaten them like this. He may not always make the best decisions, but Martin knows this isn’t one of his.

He reaches the hatch too soon, shoves it open, and climbs slowly out onto the deck, narrowing his eyes against the brightness of the light. There’s no one there – he isn’t sure what he’d expected. Perhaps scores more people, bristling with guns, there to make _sure_ that Tim and Martin go where they’re told, or more from the Stranger, with no need of them. But the deck is clear, from what he can see, the crew gone to trade.

Briefly, he considers running. He could make it _somewhere_ , he thinks, before the woman can finish climbing the ladder after him. Maybe into the town, where he might be able to find one of Mike’s people, to help. But that would leave Tim alone, and he can’t be sure that she wouldn’t just shoot him. Can’t risk it.

Instead he just stands, cattle-placid, and waits, watches as she makes her careful way up, the pistol still tight in her grip. She scrambles out onto the deck, then grabs Martin’s arm, snaps down at Tim to join them. Martin watches him ascend, can see that he’s making it take as long as possible.

“Martin?”

The call comes from the top of the gangway, on the other side of the ship, just as Tim is crawling up and out – Martin turns, recognises Mike, pausing to take in the scene, and then quickening his pace over towards them. Martin hesitates, sure that he should say something, indicate the danger somehow, but all that he can find it in his head to do is lean down and help Tim to his feet.

“If you’re going, you’ll need your coats,” Mike says, but his voice slows as he draws closer, his expression cooling until it’s the same cutting temperature as the wind. “What’s going on?” 

“I’m getting what I came here for,” the woman says. She snatches hold of Tim, draws him across in front of her and presses the gun close to the small of his back. “But I only need one of them, so–”

Something crunches behind Martin’s eyes, punctures his horizon so utterly that he drops to his knees, would fall further if he hadn’t managed to snag a handful of Tim’s shirt on the way down. The vertigo is intense enough that he can’t tell that he’s not face down on the deck, and he stumbles in his efforts to pull Tim clear.

Before them, the quiet man that Martin has grown to know has been replaced by a cold, hard-eyed stranger, hands clenched into fists at his sides.

Behind, the woman seems to be miles away from them. The deck spools out between them impossibly far, the space warping and stretching, as it’s convinced it holds more distance than it should. She aims the gun, but Martin can already tell that the bullet wouldn’t be able to reach them before they could get out of the way.

The woman lets out a shout of frustration, and then drops hard to the deck, the gun skittering off away from her. Tries to scrabble upright again, but she can’t seem to balance, her hands sliding out when she tries to get them under her, sending her crashing down again. She cries out again, and this time, Martin thinks he can make out a word in it.

Mike advances, menace in every movement enough to make Martin shiver, and it’s easy enough to recognise that she’s not going to get out of this – maybe he’ll just kill her, or maybe he’ll try to get answers first, but either way, she’s not leaving the ship.

There’s a blur of motion from the gangway, as someone else sprints up onto the ship, moving far too fast. Another woman, Martin thinks, but he’s not certain – she seems rangier, hungrier, more like a wild animal than a person, and she crashes hard into Mike. He’s caught under a whirling, snarling shape, and he turns his vertigo on it – she falters, stumbles, her momentum carrying her towards the side. Can’t slow down fast enough to avoid the drop, but at no point does the anger he can hear from her give way to fear. She simply reaches out, as she falls, snags Mike with a hand, and then they both go over the edge.

* * *

Jon is expecting an attack. A snap, of some kind, a new side to Elias that he’s not seen before. A knife at his throat or a gun pointed at his head, or an intrusion into his mind designed to crumple him from the inside out. Something fast and angry and aiming to deal with him as quickly as possible, so that Elias can get him out of the way and go to get his hip in order.

Instead, there is nothing but calm. Elias sighs, steeples his hands on the desk in front of him, and slowly begins to pack away the stones that hadn’t fallen, folding the box closed as if he has nothing else to worry about.

Somewhere, Jon knows, Melanie has struck. She’s at the steering column, or at least, that had been the plan. Three groups – the first, to strike at the engine. It’s a delicate thing, she’d told him, a tangle of delicate Vast threads, bound into one another, that holds them in the air by the grace of Simon Fairchild. Disrupt it, and the whole ship will feel it. Give her the chance to take the steering column from Emma. Meanwhile, Jon keeps Elias occupied, and he’ll have help as soon as the ship’s under control.

The majority of the crew, Melanie had said, would follow whoever, and the exceptions would be placed under guard in the brig, and put on land at next port.

“Mutiny, Jon?” Elias asks, still unsettlingly smooth. “Really? I thought we were making progress.” 

“You were lying to me.” It comes out as a strained hiss, the relief of no longer having to keep up the pretence lodging in his throat. “You – you said we were going to get Tim and Martin back.”

“And we are,” Elias says, slotting the intact box away into his desk drawer. “Or, at least, I am.”

“No,” Jon manages, heat clouding the words. “No, we’ve made no progress at all. We’re no closer to them than we were when we first left Larkrest, and Melanie tells me–”

“Oh, you don’t want to go listening to Miss King,” Elias assures him, with a swift, dismissive gesture. “She’s been stoking that bile of hers ever since it turned out that she wasn’t quite good enough to live up to my expectations, and she really couldn’t accept my charity in allowing her to continue as a part of my crew.” He pushes himself to his feet, reaches for his hat, and settles it back onto his head, carefully adjusting its angle. “Anyway. I should go and deal with this. I’ll decide what to do with you later, Jon – maybe while I’m gone, you should reconsider your part in all of this.”

“I won’t.” Jon rises, too, pushes a hand into his pocket, and feels it sit for one comfortable, terrifying moment on the hilt of the knife that Melanie had given. Wasn’t one of her better ones, she’d said, but it would do the job.

“We’ll see.” Elias starts to circle around the desk, towards the door, and Jon moves to block his path, finds it easier than he thought he would. There should, he’s sure, be more fear. After all that time thinking of Eric Delano, stewing in the idea of his own keelhauling – and now there’s just a quiet sense of purpose. “Jon, I do not have the time to–”

Jon lunges at him, pulling the knife out so quickly that it rips into his jacket on the way out. It’s not a skilled attack, not by any means – he’s had no training with the weapon, not the way that Melanie has, but he has fury enough to make up for it. He slashes out, frenzied, and Elis stumbles back, his face twisting with surprise.

There’s no blood. Jon’s not even sure he’s making contact, save for the catch of the point in the fabric of Elias’ clothes, but he tells himself that he doesn’t have to. All he needs to do is buy time, keep Elias in check until he’s sure that the others have managed to accomplish their goal.

Elias spits out something that Jon can’t hear past the blood roaring in his ears. He raises a hand, like he’s trying to indicate to Jon to stop, but he just cuts at it, knocks him back with a shove. Elias impacts with the desk, and as he does, there’s an echo of the thud in his head. Terror sweeps through him, violent enough to carve his knees from under him, and it’s only dumb luck that he manages to pitch forwards to pin Elias down, and not off him completely.

There’s a voice, screaming, and he can feel a rawness in his throat that tells him it’s his – not his. Sasha’s. She’s watching, trying to, the flash of flame too bright, at first. As she focuses, he recognises Martin’s shape with a jolt of her horror, crumbled in the corridor beyond, Tim a little way past him. There’s an instant where she thinks that one might be crawling for the other, and then they’re both still.

At the far end, she sees something duck through the space where the front door should have been, grey and spindly and so unnaturally tall that it has to hunch to avoid scraping its head on the ceiling. 

“ _No_ ,” Jon snarls, shaking it out of his head. He shoves harder into Elias, knocking him back down off his feet. “No, you do not get to me like that. I’ve already dreamed the worst things that could happen to them.”

Elias bares his teeth, soundlessly, and pushes something else into his mind. Jon can feel him, in the places where their skin connects, reaching in and rifling through all the worst thoughts he’s ever had. There’s him, snapping at Martin, telling him that his best work wasn’t good enough, grumbling at Tim over yet another flirtation that had left him unable to get a good deal on books for months.

Not him. Not anymore. And he is the one with the knife.

He drives it out again, but finds himself on the defensive – he twists, trying to keep Elias from finding anything else to distract him with, but it’s a doomed effort. Elias’ hand clamps around his wrist, fingers pressing like metal bands, trying to force him to let go of his weapon.

“We will sort this,” Elias growls, between heavy, panting breaths. “Later.”

He smashes Jon’s arm into the side of the desk, and the knife hits the floor with a clatter, skitters somewhere underneath it. It’s a failure he feels down to his marrow – he struggles, tries to push Elias back down, but he turns Jon’s momentum back on him, and shoves down face-first, holds him there.

Maybe, Jon thinks, desperately trying to scrabble himself upright, it had been long enough. The ship at least feels steady now, so perhaps Melanie’s struggles over the ship have succeeded, or just been lost so badly that it’s all already over.

“Give _up_ ,” Elias orders, with a pointed wrench at Jon’s arm that feels as if it’s going to snap his back in two. “I have more important things to be dealing with–”

“Elias.”

It comes from somewhere above him, and the pressure keeping Jon down abruptly vanishes – he almost falls sideways, struggling back upright, and sees Elias with both hands raised, backing away from the place where he had been. Behind him, Melanie, with her own knife pressed against Elias’ throat.

He’s trapped there. Done. If he tries to do to Melanie what he’d done to Jon, fill her head with someone else’s thoughts, she’ll cut him open, and he’ll bleed out.

Jon can’t bring himself to do anything but wait for it to happen.


	10. Chapter 10

Tim runs. It’s the only thing that he knows how to do. Takes Martin’s hand, drags him away from it all. He’s sure they’re going too slow anyway, that at any moment there’ll be the crack of a gunshot, one of them will fall, and the other one won’t go on without him. Their feet thud hard against the boards, utterly obvious, like sending up a flag to their pursuers, telling them where to go. They could probably guess anyway. Tim’s choice of direction is not a rational one, not something that he’s thought through – would have been better to hide, find somewhere in the bowels of the ship where it wouldn’t occur to anyone to look for them.

Instead, head ringing with panic and unable to keep his breathing steady, he takes them back to the last place that either of them had felt safe: Mike’s cabin. Staggers inside, grabs for the desk chair to tuck under the door handle, and then guides Martin over to crouch on the far side of the bed, so that anyone shooting through won’t be able to aim properly at them.

Martin doesn’t seem to notice. He’s staring off towards the window, through it, eyes far too large, wandering. Tim takes his face in his hands, turns it gently back towards him, tapping at his cheek.

“Martin?” he whispers, as loudly as he dares, and there’s at least a flicker of something there, before his attention wavers back to the sky beyond the glass again. “Hey, hey.”

“Do you think he might have…” Martin bites at his lip, and Tim knows that he’s thinking, bargaining, trying to work out if there’s any way that Mike could have lived. If he could have caught hold of spar or trailing line, climbed back aboard, struck some fortunate outcrop, or somehow been able to use his Vast magic to save himself.

“He’s gone,” Tim tells him, any cruelty that might be in it sapped by the shake in his voice. “He’s gone, and… and we’ll deal with it later. We have to get out of this. That woman…”

“She said Jon sent her.” A little more focus, there, a little more fear.

“Yeah,” Tim nods, tries to take it as a good sign, more engagement in the current situation and less shock and grief overcoming everything else. “Well. She was lying. I know I’ve done some shoddy work for Jon in the past but I don’t think he’d try and have me killed. It’s more Stranger bullshit. They’ve just learnt all our names now.”

“Do you think he could be hurt?”

“Who? Jon?” Tim shakes his head, offers Martin the best smile he can muster. The result doesn’t feel like a success. “No. He wasn’t there when they took us–” _so he’ll hurt and hurt and always wonder if he could have made things different_ “–so there’s no reason to think they got to him. They just know his name, like they did mine.”

Martin nods, though Tim’s sure that there are more holes in the argument than a sieve, that his mind will find its way through them, eventually. He tries to find a new one, but he’s too struck with the years ahead of Jon, aching grief and remorse. Instead he just pulls Martin closer, wraps his arms around him. They’re both shaking, a violent trembling that he knows the hold won’t steady, but Martin seems to fold into him, and all he can do is tighten it.

When the pounding starts up on the door, they start so violently that Martin’s head knocks into Tim’s chin, clacking his teeth painfully together, hard enough that he can feel it through the rest of his skull.

“Open the door!” It’s the woman’s voice, raw now, hitching. The one who’d gone over the side had been something to her, Tim thinks. She must have gone to the edge, must have looked, must have seen that there was no chance, for either of them. They had both fallen, and it’s a long way down to the bottom off the cliff, far enough that it’s impossible to see the bottom of the waterfalls that Mike had wanted to show them. “I will shoot through it!”

“Stay down,” Tim whispers, because it feels better than doing nothing. He glances around the room, trying to see if there’s anything that they could use to defend themselves, but there’s nothing except the unspecified dangers apparently posed by some of the books, and he has no intention of messing with cursed objects now. Mike, he supposes, hadn’t had need of physical weaponry, not when he was carrying all that Vast around in his head.

They could try hiding – in the wardrobe, perhaps, or under the bed, but they’re all places where she’d look too soon, and they’d have no chance to defend themselves. Perhaps he could tuck in behind the door, lunge at her when she steps inside, give Martin time to try and find one of Mike’s crew.

There’s another crash from the door, and the chair falls away from it, one of the legs snapping with the force. There’s motion, as something else slides over the floor, and Tim pulls Martin lower, trying to see under the bed. It’s the gun – the woman is groping after it, but she can’t seem to get her legs underneath her, wavering like she’d done on deck.

Maybe, Tim thinks, if he’s quick enough, he might be able to reach it. He has no idea how to use it, but perhaps just holding it would be enough. Make her stop, or even get some answers from her.

Then anther hand snatches it up, and the chance is gone.

“Get off my ship.”

Harriet’s voice. Mike’s first mate – Tim lets out a slow breath, slumps into Martin. He watches the woman’s boots as they stumble out through the door, and then closes his eyes, takes a moment just to breathe.

“You seem to be in demand, still.”

He looks up again to see her standing over them, her voice sharp, assessing. There’s nothing in her face that Tim could identify as grief, none of that familiar sense he knows from Mike’s of being in the lieu of the storm. 

“We’ve never seen her before in our lives,” Tim tells her, and glances at Martin, checking for confirmation. He’s staring towards the window again, face slack.

“That’s hardly any bother to me,” Harriet says. She glances down at the gun, studying it, like she’s taking note of all the mechanisms that it she’s need to operate to fire it. “I know the captain was sweet on the two of you. Captain’s dead now. I’ll see if I can find out what you’re worth.”

“Mike was going to let us go,” Tim protests, and he welcomes the anger that stabs through it. Easier to keep going on rage than grief. “You can’t–” 

“I absolutely can,” Harriet says. “I am the captain now, after all, and the two of you have value.” She smiles, her attention flickering upwards, as if she’s finally achieved something she’s been waiting for for a very long time, and he can see the fall in her eyes, knows she’s as touched by it as Mike had been. “You can stay in his cabin until I find somewhere else for you to go, I suppose. Need a few days for the smell of him to fade before I move in.”

He should have gone for the gun. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to shoot her with it, maybe she could have consigned the bullet to an eternity of flying, but it would have been something to _try_. Perhaps it would have worked, and he could have made her let them go, walked out into an uncertain future in Highwater and at least been free of all of this.

As it is, all he can do is watch her walk out again, and hear the noise of it as she locks the door behind her.

Tim exhales, long and low, and then glances back down at Martin – he can see that he wants to go to the window, gaze out and down, as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of Mike, somewhere far below. He doesn’t let him, just draws him a little more upright and tilts his face back towards him.

He opens his mouth to promise something, some version of their future where they can make it through this, but all he can manage is a faint, soft sob. Martin hugs him back, and they both begin to cry.

* * *

“I don’t think you want to do that, Miss King,” Elias says, and he looks infuriatingly unruffled by it all, actually lets his hands drop to straighten the creases out of his clothes – there’s nothing, Jon notes with a savage satisfaction, that he can do about the rips. His gaze flickers to Jon, and glimmers with a kind of smug certainty that makes Jon want to go scrabbling under the desk for his knife. “Or, at least, I don’t think you want to let her, Jon.”

“I don’t really care one way or the other,” Jon spits. He takes a moment to rotate his arm, check that Elias hasn’t done any permanent damage to it. “If Melanie wants you to die, I’m not going to stop her.”

“I think you are,” Elias tells him, a small smile playing about his lips. “You didn’t think I was letting you advance without some measure of insurance, did you? If I die, so do your friends.”

Melanie raises her eyebrows at Jon, asking silently whether he really intends to continue listening to this. She could end it, she tells him, pull the blade a little deeper and he’d stop talking, no more sound from him but the bubble of his blood in his throat.

Jon takes a moment, circles around the desk to pick up his knife, knows that he should go over and plunge it into Elias’ flesh by way of answer. Can’t take the risk. He knows that as well as Melanie does, as Elias does.

“What are you talking about?” he demands, voice spiked enough that Elias’ lips twitch with satisfaction.

“Why don’t you reach out?” Elias suggests, his pronunciation victoriously perfect. “See if you can tell what your friends are feeling right now.”

Jon doesn’t. There are still those carved stones, scattered over the floor, but he doesn’t move to take one, and Melanie gives him a small, approving smile. It’s a trick, she thinks, a lie, something carefully calculated to get him to do whatever Elias wants, so that he’ll be able to get the upper hand again. Jon isn’t going to let him.

“If you did,” Elias adds. “I’m sure you would find them… a little less under the open sky.”

“Just tell me,” Jon orders, and he can hear the strain in it himself.

“Well,” Elias says. He looks like he adores the moment, like he’s been waiting to tell them all how clever he is for far too long and the toll it’s been taking on him is finally lifted. Jon tightens his fingers around the handle of the knife. “When it became clear that you had a gift for the Beholding, I imagined that you might progress a little more quickly than my previous subjects – and maintain your human attachments a little longer. I thought that if that was the case, once you were clear-eyed enough to see what I was doing, you might become rather difficult to handle. Your motivations were rather obvious, so I decided to take control of them.”

“What did you _do_?” Jon steps closer, brings the knife up, though they all know he’s not going to use it.

“I took steps to make sure that you would never find them,” Elias says. “I hired a pair of hunters – they came highly recommended – and gave them all the information I had been able to establish. They found your friends a few days ago – you remember how the sensations you got from them changed, Jon? They’re now holding them, with instructions to kill them if I do not make contact. So, for their sake, you should put an end to this whole nonsense now.”

“You’re lying,” Melanie snaps, brings her blade up higher against Elias’ neck, bringing him up onto his toes. “You couldn’t have hired anyone–”

“I did,” he says, still too calm. “In Rookside. You saw me go ashore, didn’t you, Jon? I’m told your friends were very easy to corral, holding hands the whole time. Very sweet. Did you know that they’re involved, now?”

“Shut up,” Jon grinds out, can feel every letter of it in his throat.

“Do make your mind up, Jon.” Elias smirks. “Do you want me to talk, or don’t you?”

Jon tightens his jaw, his teeth pressing at each other. He wants to sink them into Elias’ skin, feel it break under them. Wants him to bleed, wants to be responsible for it.

“I thought,” Elias goes on. “I would keep them ahead of you until you sank yourself deep enough into the magic that you would no longer care, or use them to apply pressure if you decided to turn on me. Once you were dead, I thought I might test them to see if they displayed the same aptitude, turn them loose if there was nothing I could learn from them. I could have them hurt, I could have one of them killed, to keep you where I want you. So, Jon, I would reconsider whatever promises Melanie has made to you about going after them.”

“Prove it,” Jon snarls, and he can scarcely even recognise his own voice. “If you have them, if you want me to believe that – prove it.”

“I can hardly do that,” Elias points out, like he’s a teacher, correcting an error in Jon’s sums. “If I tell you something about them – well, it’s possible I could have just known that by myself, isn’t it? I can’t have you sent anything of theirs without risking having my contractors traced, and I wouldn’t want you getting it into your head to go on any ill-advised rescue attempts.” He offers Jon a smile that he could swear is more genuine than any of the others he’s seen from him. “Why don’t you tell Melanie here to put the knife away, and we’ll get on with things a little more honestly, hm?”

“I’m not letting him go.” Melanie’s voice is sharp as her knife, and Jon flinches from it.

“I know,” he assures her, tries to force his tone gentler. “I’m not asking you to. But I… I can’t let you kill him.”

“ _Let_ me?” she echoes, derisive.

“ _Please_ ,” he amends, hates that he can see how much Elias is enjoying the conversation. “I need them to be all right. If there’s even a chance he’s telling the truth – I can’t have them die.”

She takes a long moment, sighs, and then brings the knife down, presses the point into Elias’ back.

“To the brig, then,” she growls, forcing him ahead of her.

“Thank you,” Jon tells her, but she ignores him, her shoulders stiffening as she passes, driving Elias out through the door, into the space beyond.

He waits until they’ve gone, hesitates a little longer and then turns. Stoops, and picks one of the carved stones from the floor. It’s intact, mostly, a small chip across the design, but he reasons that that shouldn’t be an issue, not if the items themselves aren’t important. It feels familiar to him, the weight something his hands have held before, and he closes his fingers around it.

It’s harder to reach, without Elias there. It’s like the connection that he’s been able to use before is fogged, blurring when he tries to take hold of it, but he keeps trying, recounts enough of the last night he’d seen them to soften the edges of his mind.

He’s hit by a bolt of fear so forceful that it nearly knocks him to the floor. There’s grief, pain, but the terror overrides the rest of it, snatches the breath from his lungs and marks him down to the marrow.

The stone clatters back to the floor, and Jon staggers into the wall with a soft moan. Slides down against it, and starts to weep.

* * *

Tim sleeps. Martin’s sure that he thinks that he’s doing the same. They’d cried for a long time, and it had only been natural for unconsciousness to follow, no strength left in them to cling to wakefulness. Maybe it’s better, just to not be aware for a while.

Martin certainly feels wretched enough with his eyes open. The floor’s uncomfortable, for all that he does his best to pillow Tim against him. Neither of them had suggested using Mike’s bed, and he doubts that they will. Easier to just lie where they’d not been able to run anymore. But that’s the least of it, of course.

He watches Tim sleep, and tries to draw what little peace he can from that. Replace the other image that paints itself across his mind whenever he tries to rest, the one of that last moment, before Mike had fallen. A blur of movement, that feral woman. He could swear that her fingers had ended in glinting sharp claws, that her eyes had seemed to gleam yellow in the day’s dim light.

Mike had been trying to help them. Protect them. If it hadn’t been for him, they would surely already be with the Stranger – perhaps they will be soon anyway, since Harriet clearly has no intention of honouring his wishes. Tim might have been shot, if it hadn’t been for what he’d done against the first woman and her gun. 

Martin had been so grateful, at the time. Feels almost guilty for that, for being relieved, for believing that they were going to be all right. For everything before, for thinking that everything was going to be sorted, that Mike would one day fly them back to Larkrest and that before that they’d have letters with Jon. It’s as if he’d somehow managed to curse it, because then Mike had been taken by the sky that he loved so much, and they’re back with nothing again.

He lets out a soft, elongated breath of a sob, and strokes a hand through Tim’s hair – he mumbles something, turns his face into Martin’s shoulder like he’s seeking comfort. He does what he can, mutters some lying reassurance and touches his face. Hopes that it’s soothing, but the lines of stress stay where they’ve embedded themselves across his expression. Perhaps he’s dreaming. It’d be too much to ask, of course, that he might be able to spend any time at all unaware of what had happened.

He finds his attention shifting towards the window again – there’s movement in the darkness of the night beyond, he thinks, and clamps down hard on some stupid, hesitant supposition that it might be Mike, somehow. They’ve left Highwater far behind them, and with it whatever miniscule chance there had been that he might have been able to climb his way back up. It’s a deeper patch of shadow, something solid among the threat of stormclouds. Another ship, perhaps. He might be able to see it better if he went closer, but he doesn’t want to stand, not if it means disturbing Tim. Has no expectation that his legs would be able to hold him anyway.

It doesn’t matter. It’s not as if he has the power to do anything about it. They’re just back to being caught in the whims of the wind, tossed between captors without understanding or control. Mike had been the only thing to keep them from it, and he’s gone now.

The door opens, more softly than last time. Left over respect for the captain, perhaps, or more likely just an ingrained habit of it. Harriet is used to not owning this cabin, to knocking before she walks into it. The way she strides inside makes it look like she’s trying to make up for it.

She stops standing over them again, stares down at them with clear disdain. Martin meets it, too weary to conjure hatred of his own. He should wake Tim, he thinks, shake him back to consciousness, make sure that he’s present to defend himself if he has to, but he can’t seem to make it happen, his limbs too heavy.

There’s probably nothing that he could do anyway. Harriet isn’t holding the gun anymore, but she doesn’t need to.

“We’ve arrived,” she says, curtly, with no effort to adjust her tone. Tim shifts in his sleep, mumbles something, but doesn’t rouse. “It’s time.”

“Time for what?” Martin’s voice comes out hushed. Tim will hate him for it later, he thinks, but he still doesn’t go to prod him. The waking world is only going to get worse, and Tim can be free of it for just a minute longer, if that’s all Martin can give him.

“Which of you is Tim Stoker?” Harriet asks.

Back to that old, aching question. Martin swallows past an abrupt nausea in his throat, and closes his mouth as hard as he can. That’s not something it’s safe to answer. The ship beyond the window must have been the Stranger, already. Perhaps Harriet had contacted them from port.

“If you don’t tell me,” Harriet says. “I’ll just hand over the both of you. It’s no trouble for me. I don’t care one way or the other. But the Stranger wants Tim Stoker, and they’re offering a very good deal for him.”

“What will happen to Martin?” He hates himself for asking, that it’s even crossed his mind to do so. Shifts his hold on Tim, just enough to curl his hands into tight fists.

“We’ll put him off the ship, I suppose,” Harriet says, with an impatient shrug. “The Vast has no need of captives. What we want people for, they volunteer. We’ll turn him lose, next time we’re in port.”

“Fine.” Martin closes his eyes for a moment, and then gently sets about extracting Tim’s sleeping form from his, lays him carefully down on the floor, somehow manages to keep moving even when all he wants to do is cringe away from it all. Tim will hate him for this. But it’s the only choice that he has left, the only way that he can still make a difference, and he’s going to take it. He murmurs a quiet apology, presses a kiss to Tim’s forehead, and unfurls himself painfully into standing. “I’m Tim.”

“There.” Harriet gestures towards the door, and Martin takes an uncertain, faltering step. His legs hold, so he manages another. Tries not to look back to Tim, fails. He’s frowning, now, clearly aware even through his sleep that there’s something not right. “Was that so difficult?”

“Take care of him,” Martin manages. “Please.”

Harriet snorts.

“We won’t kill him,” she says. “And that’s all you’re getting.”

It’ll have to be good enough. He convinces himself that it is, that he can feel his breathing starting to ease, a weight pulling away from his chest. It’s better this way. He can make sure that they won’t come after Tim anymore, that he’ll be able to go home. That’s worth it, worth even never seeing him or Jon or Sasha again.

They’ll be pleased to see him. Sasha will throw her arms around his neck, tell him never to do anything like that ever again. Jon will be a little more sedate, but hold him no less tightly. The three of them will recover, eventually.

Better that, Martin decides, and closes the door to Mike’s cabin carefully behind him, lets Harriet guide him up towards the deck.


	11. Chapter 11

Jon hates the brig, and he supposes that that’s the point. It’s in the lowest part of the ship, where most of the space is taken up by ballast, and what remains is a narrow, low corridor, with separate cells leading off it at the sides. He’d never really considered himself claustrophobic, but he’s grown used to the second hand joy of feeling the wind on his face, and this is so far from that that it unsettles him.

Elias’ is the one at the far end, that had the most space – not captain’s privilege, Melanie had insisted, but so that there would be room for someone else to go in without getting too close to him. The others hold his supporters, but Jon hasn’t bothered visiting them, is sure that Emma and the others would have nothing to say that he would want to hear. They’ll be put off the ship next landfall, and until that point, they’re down here, with a guard in the corridor at all times, for all that it takes able hands away from the deck.

He’s as careful as he can be, going in. Makes sure that he never turns his back, watches for any movements that he can’t explain. Elias is bound, on the far side of the room, is untied solely to let him eat, and only then under Melanie’s supervision. Not because she doesn’t trust anyone else, or so she’d told him, but because she only wants to risk herself.

There’s a stool opposite, far out of his reach, and Jon settles onto it, once he’s removed Elias’ gag and made sure that the door is closed. It won’t lock, except from outside, but the guard – Sebastian, he thinks, though he’s not sure about the man’s name – will watch it, and he’s armed.

Elias takes his time, moves his mouth and tongue around as if relearning how to use his mouth, massaging feeling back into it, and then he turns his smile on Jon.

“Jon,” he says. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“The usual,” Jon says, flat and uninterested in the false pleasantries. “Tim and Martin. Where are they?”

“Haven’t you had enough of chasing after them?” Elias asks, leaning as far forwards as his bonds will let him. “Surely you have some purpose that’s not bound to their tiny little lives. Aren’t you interested in learning something else? Don’t you miss our sessions?”

“No,” Jon glowers. “Would you like me to repeat the question?”

Elias blinks, sighs.

“If I answer it,” he says. “There really will be nothing left keeping Melanie from killing me. So it’s not really in my interest, is it?”

“You said if the hunters didn’t hear from you, they’d kill them.” Jon has asked the questions before – they’re learned by rote, now, and Elias’ answers are as unhelpful as they ever are. “How long do we have? How did you communicate with them?”

“You can’t contact them _for_ me,” Elias says, almost chiding, ever sure that the whole thing is beneath him.

“If I feel that they die,” Jon tells him, and it’s only practice that keeps his voice steady over it. “Then there won’t be anything keeping Melanie from killing you either. So… it _is_ in your interests to make sure that they don’t.” There’s still no flicker in Elias’ expression, so he pushes, tries something new. “If you give us information that helps us find them, we’ll let you go.”

Elias grins broadly, and his shoulders twitch, as if he’s trying to gesture.

“A very interesting offer,” he says. “Did you discuss it with Miss King, at all?”

“Of course.” It had been her idea – letting him go would be over the side of the ship, but Jon’s more than willing to speak in technicalities. “I’ve persuaded her to give you a day before she hunts you down, if you give me Tim and Martin.”

“You make it sound so appealing.” Elias moistens his lips. “How are they, at the moment, Jon? Upset? Are they hurting? Could you say for certain that they aren’t?”

Jon’s efforts to reach out have been difficult. More of that sensation that he’s trying to wade through freezing water to get to it, his mind weighed down like sodden clothes. When he gets there, what he finds is fear and anger, boiling through their heads so completely that he can’t sift out anything else.

“They’re not exactly content, are they?” Elias continues, and his smile has finally reached his eyes. “You could change that. Think how glad they would be to be freed, if you would just complete your time with me. And they have each other – they’ll hardly miss you the way that you do them. It’s selfish of you, really, to put your desire to be with them over their safety.”

“Shut up.” He wants to make it like the slam of a door, final and commanding. It comes out too shaky.

“No, I really do need to tell you these things,” Elias says, laughter in his tone. “For someone with such affinity for Beholding, you just aren’t very perceptive.” 

“What? What am I missing?” Jon demands, his lip curling. He tries to imagine just throwing him over the side, a second of fear from him like Eric Delano’s, but it doesn’t bring him any solace.

“You don’t even know you’re in love with them, do you?” Elias prods, condescends. “No idea.”

Jon’s first instinct is to rush to deny it. Insist that it’s nothing like that, that he _doesn’t_. Doesn’t have relationships. Not the way that Tim does, at least, from the way that he goes into detail about them. Can’t seem to make the words form in his throat.

“People don’t just sign on and travel halfway across the world to find _colleagues_ ,” Elias says. “Or even friends.”

“I think you underestimate friendship,” Jon says, floundering – he’d have done the same for Sasha, he knows that, but that’s not what he’s struggling with.

“Perhaps,” Elias concedes. “But I felt it. When you first started looking for them with me. The three of you – all those tangled emotions, binding you to each other. But you just couldn’t see it, no matter how hard you looked.” 

“I don’t…”

“There is really no point in trying to deny it to me.” Elias lets out a soft, pointed chuckle. “Although, I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’re never going to have the opportunity to explore a relationship with them, are you?”

“Just tell me where they are and I’ll let you go.” Jon tries to grab onto the original question, the stability that he can find there, and he can feel how much that amuses Elias.

“I don’t want to be _let go_ , Jon,” Elias tells him, and he almost thinks that he can make out the first cracks of temper in it. “This is my ship. Mine. I have no intention of leaving it. If you want to do something for your would-be lovers, then you free me, and let me watch you change and die.” 

“No,” Jon insists, pushes it out like a shield. “No. I’m not putting everything back the way it was before, make it so that you have no reason to give them back to me. Your choices are to stay here, or to tell me what I want to know. Talk, and you’ll be a free man again until Melanie catches up with you.”

“Then I will do the former,” Elias says. “Sooner or later, there will be an opportunity. I’ll take it when it comes. It’s your choice as to whether I send a kill order when I do.”

Jon sets his jaw, forces himself to breathe, air whistling through his teeth. Then he stands, steps over the meagre distance the room can afford, and moves Elias’ gag back into place.

He manages to keep his composure until the door is closed again, and then all he can do is lean his head against it, and struggle not to sob.

“You’re wasting your time with him.”

It’s Melanie’s voice – he’s vaguely aware of Sebastian, beyond her, staring politely at the ceiling.

“What else can I do?” Jon asks, and it’s more plea than question.

Melanie places a hand on his shoulder, and turns him gently away from the cell.

“You can come with me.”

* * *

Martin tries not to look back. He doesn’t want to see the Vast ship vanish into the distance, as the Stranger vessel moves away into the night, and takes him with it, away from any hope or chance of freedom and home. This time, he manages – can feel the distance, like something in his chest is unspooling across it, and it aches.

There’s a tiny, selfish part of him that wants to make it stop, to tell the thing that had taken him aboard that he’s not really Tim, and they don’t actually want anything with him after all, but he knows it wouldn’t do any good. He can hear the screaming from below decks already, and the air is thick with the stink of tanning hides.

He does what he can not to study the sails too closely as he’s escorted past by the silent, faceless thing that had taken him from Harriet, but even then he can still see the stitching, jagged lines in his peripheral vision. It sets his stomach roiling, makes him want to rush to the edge of the ship and hook himself over it. Perhaps, if he did, he might even fall, and find himself wherever Mike had ended up.

The creature – it’s not human, it’s limbs jointed far too many times, greyish and impossibly stretched – opens the hatch for him, and he climbs the ladder without resisting. Stands numb in the space below, and wishes it could have felt like a relief.

One of the walls is just a long row of bars, a press of humanity beyond it. There are arms stretching out towards him, and begging, wailing faces. He settles his gaze on the floor before he can consider them too much. There’s nothing he can do for them – all that he could, he had done for Tim – and he’s as trapped as they are.

He wonders, all the same, what they might be for. If they’re just more skin for the sails, or if they’re to become like his guard – he doesn’t know how you’d make that out of a person, hates the thought of it, but he’s sure that they must come from somewhere.

It folds itself to the floor after him, and they continue down, into a series of corridors that are knotted and circling like those of a maze. At one point, he thinks that he hears the hum of an engine, and tries to take some comfort from it – it’s the Vast that lets them fly, machinery of the sky that Tim had once or twice wondered if Mike might show them – but it fades as they pass, and leaves him alone again. 

The room he’s finally shoved into is small, dark, with a tiny pallet of a bed, and a high, narrow stripe of window. That’s all he can see of it, before the door closes and locks behind him, plunging him into his own personal night.

He swallows, and sets about groping his way along to towards the far wall. It’s better, he tells himself, his internal voice shaking as much as he’s sure he would aloud, than the tiny space between the hull and the ship proper, where he and Tim had been kept before. He can breathe here, at least.

The bed is hard, uncomfortable, when Martin sits on it, but from what he can tell, there are no better options inside the room. His eyes adjust, slowly, to the faint glimmer of light that comes under the door, only enough for broad shapes, but that’s still plenty to determine that there’s nothing else. No furniture, or cushions or blankets.

Crew’s quarters, he thinks, but it’s certainly more of a cell, and he dreads to think what kind of person might find it homely. Tries to distract himself by wondering if it might be the norm – surely not, when the charter ships that Jon took to markets had always charged as much as they did for a cabin.

Once he’s sure he can get there without falling, he stands again, and goes to try the door – it’s closed and locked, the handle unpleasantly warm to the touch. He starts to check around it, hoping that there might be some kind of other weakness – the ship will need to call in at port eventually, for _supplies_. That would probably mean a raid, he thinks, and stills for a moment to quell a shudder. But if he can find a way out, he might be able to get off, and make a start on the long way back to Larkrest.

It’s at least something to do. 

He hopes, idly, as he taps at walls and tries to dig his fingernails into the edges of boards, that Tim will be able to finish that letter to Jon. Tell him he’s coming home. Maybe Jon will try to scrape together the money to go and collect him, somewhere between repairing and restoring the damaged parts of the museum. Sasha might suggest some kind of collection tin – Tim had always been popular with the visitors, after all. But even if that’s not something they can do quickly, there’ll still be a connection, a bright chain of letters, spanning the sky and slowly, surely drawing Tim home safe.

Back to the door, again, before he finds anything. It’s still just as locked as it was the first time he tried, and he wanders vaguely back to the centre of the room. Perhaps he can wait to be fed, he muses, and then try to knock down whoever brings it. Run, and maybe find somewhere to hide, since he doubts they risk attending their prisoners in port.

Martin tucks his hands back into his jumper – the cold is starting to ache in them, and there’s nothing more he can do to try and get them warm again. Should have brought a coat, he thinks, and swallows a broken little laugh at the idea that Harriet would have given him the time to make sure that he was properly equipped.

Sleeping will be difficult, without anything to wrap around himself, but perhaps, he won’t get to do any of that.

He circles the room again, checking for a draft, whistling through a gap in the boards that he might be able to pry a little wider, but there’s nothing. Still, he doesn’t want to settle again. The idea of just sitting and waiting to find out exactly what the Stranger wants with Tim revolts him, flashes through his head like anger, but there’s nothing else. Just time on his hands and the threat of tears in the back of his throat.

The door opens before he can give in enough to lie down. Martin whirls wildly towards the silhouette caught there, scrutinising it even as the brightness from the hallway – barely there and yet still too much – makes him want to hide his face in his hands.

It’s tall, but not like the thing that had brought him. More human-shaped, but he knows better than to assume anything from that, after the woman who had taken them from Larkrest. There’s no reason why the ruffling over its head that he would guess was hair wouldn’t just be carefully arranged threads, elbows and knees jointed like a doll’s under neatly-sewn clothes.

It steps inside, and closes the door again behind it. Comes nearer, and with the dazzle gone, he can recognise something in the shape of a man. There’s something almost familiar against the features, he notes, as he tries to back away. They still seem a little wrong, somehow, as if they’d been assembled by someone who didn’t quite remember them properly.

“Hello,” the man says, with a smile that looks as if it was achieved by the pulling of levers. “You’re not my brother.”

* * *

Melanie leads him back to Elias’ cabin. It’s messier than Jon remembers leaving it, the cupboards and drawers turned out and papers strewn across the floor like feathers from a dead bird, as if it’s been ransacked. Crew, perhaps, he thinks, searching for trinkets or other expensive things that they might be able to sell. The desk has gone largely undisturbed, and he wonders how many of them had gone through Elias’ testing process, know enough about it to leave anything to do with his magic well alone. The stones are gone, the only trace of them a faint spill of rock dust across the floor.

“I threw them over the side,” Melanie says, when she catches him looking in its direction. “We don’t need them. Do we?”

“No,” Jon says, slowly, but he passes his fingers over a remembered shape in his hands, and thinks, briefly, of how much easier the connection had been with Tim and Martin with one. He hadn’t needed to struggle just to know that they were alive.

“No,” Melanie repeats, pushing it a little harder. “You don’t need to torture yourself with them, because we’re going to find another way. We’re going to look into their abduction properly, and we’re going to find them. Understand?”

“Yes,” Jon says, but it sounds a little weak, even to him, and he clears his throat, pushes into a change of subject. “So, what are we doing in here?”

“We’re looking for paperwork,” Melanie says. “A man like Elias doesn’t do anything without a record of it. If he’s got a space where he’s keeping your friends, then there’ll be documentation of it somewhere here.” She moves with purpose towards one of the bureaus, already hanging half-open on straining hinges, and starts to rifle through it.

Jon briefly considers the desk, and then moves away, towards a set of drawers on the other side of the room, spilling files like stuffing. He digs out a ship’s manifest and flips briefly though it – there’s a list of names, crew members, with the occasional neat notation next to them. Next to Eric Delano, a crisp hand mentions the purchase of a prohibited Dark-enchanted blindfold, and then a neat strike through the whole line, indicating that he’s no longer an issue to be concerned with.

Next to his own name, he finds the image of a stylised eye in green ink. Another sits by Melanie’s, but hers has been drawn over in black to close it, ahead of the word _malcontent_ , but there’s nothing there to indicate any knowledge of her impending mutiny.

_I kept him busy_ , Jon supposes. A new experiment, sweeping in to replace the old ones.

There’s nothing of any further use inside the manifest, so Jon slots it back into place at the bottom of the drawer, and keeps sorting through the spilled sheaf. It looks to him to be more lists of crew, the odd passenger – a file with Eric Delano’s name on the front, that makes him wonder whether there’s one somewhere with his.

He goes to pull at the next drawer along, and it lurches when he pulls it, then stops abruptly, with a faint clicking sound that makes him freeze in place, the hair lifting over the back of his neck like someone’s traced the line of his spine.

“Melanie,” he says, slowly, as if speaking too loud could shatter the room.

“What?” She sounds distracted. The glance he risks shows him that she’s still busy, rifling through papers that have been divided into neat boxes, a mixture of letters and numbers that could be expense reports. Probably nothing of use, because there’s no lock on the bureau, but they’re neat enough that it won’t take long for her to establish that. 

“Could Elias have trapped any of these?” he asks.

Melanie lets her stack of papers slap down onto the floor and rushes over to him, fishing a knife from somewhere inside her coat.

“What makes you think that?” She crouches down beside him, studying the drawer, gives an experimental tug at the one below, which moves smoothly and easily out.

“I tried to open it and it clicked,” Jon tells her, keeps his grip on the handle as steady as he can, half-expecting the whole thing to go up if he moves by even a hair’s breadth. “I know it’s been a while since I was around furniture like this, but they don’t usually behave like that.”

Melanie nods, half to herself, and then straightens, testing the drawer above like she’s trying to work out if she could cut down through it – it looks too solid to Jon, like it would be better to try and get a saw and go in from the back.

She pats a hand along the outside of her pockets, and then dips into them, comes out with a slim black wallet, swapping her knife out for a long hook and pin.

“I think you can move your hand,” she says. “I’m going to try and pick the lock.”

Jon pulls his hand back as quickly as he dares, and takes a full pace backwards, in an effort to give her as much room as possible to work. She doesn’t acknowledge it, just carefully pushes her tools into the gaps and concentrates.

It seems to take an age. Jon backs away far enough to pick up one of the reports, which seems to be an inventory of goods traded at Highwater the previous year. Nothing helpful, just a clear indication that Elias’ bookkeeping is excellent, exactly as he’d expected.

Before he can reach for another one, there’s a click of rotating tumblers, and Melanie lets out a small sound of satisfaction.

“There,” she says, and gestures for him to come back over. “It looks like it’s spring-loaded. If you try to force the drawer open without disabling it, it fires out something.” She takes her knife again, and severs something, brings up what looks like a thin packet of powder. After considering him for a moment, she touches it to the report in his hand, and the paper begins to fizz with a noise like sand falling away, shrivelling and blackening as if touched by an invisible flame. “That would’ve destroyed anything in the drawer. And probably your eyes, too, if it got in them.”

Jon reaches for the drawer again, cautiously pulling it the rest of the way out. It’s full of papers, files laid vertically through and organised, as far as he can tell, alphabetically by surname. He dips a finger in to separate them, searching for S, and then yanks his hand back hard, barely in time to avoid the jaws of a small lizardlike thing that leaps from between the papers, strange eyes swivelling to regard Jon with a baleful hiss.

He backs away as it starts to reorient itself for another strike, noting the twin fangs curling oversized from its mouth. Venomous, probably, though it’s not a species that he recognises.

At its next spring, Melanie brings the box that had once housed Elias’ eye stones in to intercept it, and slams the lid down hard, pulling the latches into place, before she returns it to the desk.

“He definitely didn’t want us to see these,” Melanie says, and goes back to the drawer, digging through it, utterly focussed. She finds the right place, pulls out a file and opens it to what he recognises as the contract that he’d signed when he had first come aboard the ship. She flips past that, impatient, and then finally pulls something out, and holds it out for Jon.

It’s another contract, this one with more writing than just Elias’, the other hand neater and with far fewer loops. It’s sparse, the meaning obscured by as much official language as possible, but it concerns the hiring of two women, who are being paid to retrieve Martin Blackwood and/or Tim Stoker, and return them to Elias. He doesn’t recognise the names, and when he points them out to Melanie, she shakes her head.

“He was telling the truth,” Jon concludes, his voice panging like the hollowness in his chest. “He has them.” It’s nothing, he supposes, that he hadn’t already known. He’d _felt_ that something had gone wrong for them, that they’d been taken away from that sky. Hoped that it might be something else, somehow, but this is more than he can ignore.

“No,” Melanie says. “No, he doesn’t do that. Just because he hired someone to do the job doesn’t mean that they did. They might not have found them.”

Jon gives a short, sharp laugh. He’s not that lucky, doesn’t believe that any of them could be, not after everything that’s happened.

“He paid them,” he points out. “Do you think he’d have done that if he had any doubts?”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Melanie tells him, reaches out to give his arm an awkward, supportive pat. “There’s a lot more here to go through. We might be able to find a location, or a way to contact them. If we can talk to them – there’s a lot of value in our cargo. Perhaps we could sway them.”

It’s all too uncertain for Jon. Possibilities, not facts, that don’t hold enough sway when as far as he can tell, the most likely scenario is exactly what Elias had said it was. Especially as the only part of it that he can know for certain is that they’re in trouble.


	12. Chapter 12

Before Martin can even try to take that in, the stranger is moving again. He’s fast, unnaturally so, and it’s all that Martin can do to stumble backwards, try to keep away from him. His shoulders strike at the wall, and he cringes back into it, but the man just moves straight into his space, steps close enough to lean in and take a long, thoughtful breath from Martin’s neck.

“You do smell like him, though,” he says, raising his head, near enough that Martin can feel his breath against his lips, just a fraction of an inch away. “Do you know where he is?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Martin manages. He tries to cast his gaze off sideways, consider the floor and only the floor, but the man takes his jaw in one hand and lifts his face again, turns it from side to side like he’s examining him, studying his skin for the slightest of flaws. His fingers are too stiff, the bends in them too angular. It’s unnatural, a desperation to try and rip himself free spreading wings in his throat, even if it makes him bleed, like a fox in a trap.

“You do!” the man says, with a broad smile. Martin doesn’t want to look into his mouth. His teeth are too regular, too neat, and the details of him make Martin’s skin crawl. “My brother. Tim.”

“Tim doesn’t have any family,” Martin says, and tries to punctuate it with a shove, at least get the man’s hands off him, but he doesn’t seem to even notice, just sways back in again, right up against him.

“Yes, he does,” he says, though he doesn’t sound angry at having to contradict, and his grip on Martin’s face doesn’t tighten. “I haven’t seen him in a very long time. I’ve been looking forward to it. I’m Danny.” 

Martin doesn’t know the name. He’d never heard Tim speak about a brother, or any siblings at all, for that matter. There’d been a vague acknowledgement of parents, but from the way that he’d mentioned them, it had sounded like they were in the past. Some kind of family disagreement, or perhaps they were both dead. He hadn’t wanted to ask about it in case it was a sore subject, or led to him feeling like he needed to share about his own family situation, so that was where it had stayed. Besides, they had been their own family. That’s what Martin had wanted them to be – he’d liked the thought of it, that they were their own place, their own home. They’d found each other, and it was small and safe and good.

“Where is he?” Danny asks, and he moves his head down to smell Martin’s neck again – where, Martin realises, with a sensation like frost cracking in his veins, Tim’s sleeping face had been pressed, not too long ago. Tim’s scent must be all over him – they’ve been so close since they’d been taken that they might as well have been the same person.

“I don’t know,” Martin says, and tells himself that it’s true, for all that his voice shakes on it. He could still be on the Vast ship, or maybe Harriet had called in at port especially to put him off. In either case, he couldn’t give a location. He doesn’t know _where_ the Vast ship is.

“Hm,” Danny says, but it doesn’t sound like he’s suspicious. He just lets go, withdraws a little way, enough that it finally feels like Martin can breathe again, and offers Martin a smile that goes too far across the sides of his face. “It’s nice to meet Tim’s friends. Are you his friend?”

“Um… yes?” Martin tries. It’s not the name he’d give it, although he wouldn’t know how to refer to it himself. They’re something different. He gropes for something that wouldn’t feel wrong or inadequate or presumptuous, and just finds himself remembering the feeling of Tim’s lips on his. His bones ache with the idea that it’ll never happen again.

Better this way, he reminds himself. Keeping Tim safe. This thing shaped like a person, like a brother, would not be good for him. He’s not right, Stranger all the way through.

“That’s nice,” Danny says. He takes Martin’s wrist in one hand, without hesitation, as if Martin’s a doll for him to manipulate, and turns it over, scrutinising. All too aware that it’s the hand Tim usually holds, Martin goes to pull it out of Danny’s grip, but Danny doesn’t let it go.

“He never mentioned you,” Martin says, throws it out as a distraction, sharper than he means it.

“It’s been a very long time,” Danny tells him, absently. “I’ve changed a lot. But that’s all right. It’s not going to be much longer.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Martin repeats, a little more firmly now, struggling to make up for the way that his heartbeat stutters, quickens, sure that Danny must be able to feel it in his wrist. “So you might as well just… move me to the cage with the others.” He doesn’t want to go there. The thought of it is enough to make him feel sick. Not enough room to breathe, shoving and gasping for every lungful of air, choking out fear that hangs over the group like a crowd, but better that than giving Tim up.

Danny blinks, tipping his head to the side as though he’s trying to affect confusion. Martin manages to pull his wrist free, and folds his arms protectively across his chest.

“No,” he says, slowly, more clearly as if he thinks Martin hasn’t quite understood him properly. “No, you’re a friend of Tim’s. You should wait. He’ll want to play with you when he gets home.”

“Tim’s not coming,” Martin insists. He wants to raise his voice, shout that it’s not going to happen, that he’d made _sure_ that Tim would be okay, that they should just get on with killing him and put an end to it.

“When we find him,” Danny amends, as if that had been the problem. “You’re his friend. He’ll want to see you. He’ll get here.” He reaches out again, as if he’s trying to offer Martin a comforting pat on the arm, and Martin squirms sideways, trying to keep out of his reach. “We’re going to be a family again, me and him.”

“No,” Martin says, softly, but he’s not sure that Danny even hears it – he just keeps talking, and the pitch of his voice doesn’t change, like it’s being pushed from a recorder in the back of his throat and he can’t access enough of the control dials to make it convincing.

“We’re going to find him,” he repeats. “And then we’re going to be a family.” His hand lands on Martin’s arm, this time, rests there, far too heavy, and Martin shuts his eyes, tries not to feel it, waits for it to be over. “You can help.”

* * *

Tim’s dreams are a horrorscape. He stumbles through them, struggling to flee nightmare after nightmare, but he can find no respite. He dreams of Danny again, memories that had left him alone the whole time that he had lived in Larkrest, but now he finds himself back walking the streets of an empty town, everyone in it stolen away. His childhood home holds portraits of his parents’ disapproval, a false insistence that they didn’t blame him etched in where the artist’s signature should go, and there’s a note on the table to remind him to ship them off too, in a few months.

When he leaves himself, he finds Martin and Jon and Sasha again, just as he always had, but they’re different now, stitched together from the terrors around them and begging him for help that he can’t give. Jon is falling, buffeted by storm winds, open wounds on his arms and face from the slashing talons of some kind of bird. Sasha sits alone in the ancient ruins of their museum, covered in a film of grey dust where she has been trying to rebuild it, but the hands that she uses don’t belong to her, and insist on taking the stones down, instead of piling them up.

Martin is with him, always with him, silent and still, and Tim cannot find where he’s bleeding from.

He’s dragged from it all by a hand at his shoulder, and he throws his arms out in an effort to defend himself – one palm slaps into what he thinks is a knee, and then his blow is being nudged aside with a boot, as if it’s nothing.

“Stop it.”

He recognises Harriet’s voice, scrabbles upright, glaring at her. He reaches automatically for Martin, but the space on the floor beside him is cold, and there’s no familiar shape on the bed, or anywhere else in the cabin.

“Where’s Martin?” he demands, voice off-key but still sharp.

Harriet stares at him for a moment, and then shrugs, as if dismissing something.

“Gone,” she says. “We made our trade with the Stranger.”

“What?” Tim pushes himself to his feet, fists clenched, but his sense of balance starts to warp, delivers him smartly back onto his knees, before it settles. A reminder that he has no chance if he decides to attack her. “No. The Stranger wanted me.”

“He went in your place,” Harriet says. “I’d take the blessing. They don’t treat their prisoners as well as we have. You’re free to go. We’re in port, so pack anything you want to take and go.”

“No,” Tim shakes his head, gingerly tries to stand again, and this time, she lets him. “No, why would you let him do that? The Stranger is going to know.”

“He didn’t seem to think so,” Harriet tells him, and there’s an edge starting to find its way into her tone, making it clear that this isn’t a conversation she wants to have. “It was his choice, and I don’t care.”

Tim works his jaw, feels the off-set of slight, warning vertigo against his anger and burns through it.

“That wasn’t what Mike wanted,” he growls. “He wasn’t going to do that.”

“Then that was his problem,” Harriet snaps back. “Not mine. Not anymore. He always was a nuisance. If I’d been in command like I was supposed to be, relations with the Stranger would never have got fraught enough that any of their ships would fly without paying their tithes.”

Tim glares harder, hates that he can’t try anything further without being knocked straight down again. His face his hot, rage and fear building inside his skin until his throat feels full of steam.

“I was _born_ for this,” she goes on, her own voice cutting, contempt for Mike clear. “I’m a Fairchild. I was learning the politics of the sky before I could read. I know what I’m doing, but the second that he swans in with a mind full of storm, grandfather’s head was turned. Perfect, he said. But he’s been up here chasing the winds and falling in love with people who might as well be dandelion seeds, and I’m the one who’s here to pick up the pieces.”

Tim steps past her, and starts to gather the small pile of belongings that Martin had put aside to take with them, if they had decided to leave at Highwater. He has no intention of giving her the impression that he’s willing to listen to the rest of her rant, unwilling to let her have the catharsis. Maybe once, he would have sympathised with her position, but it doesn’t matter now. Mike’s gone. Martin’s gone. One of them, he might have a chance to get back. 

“Where was the Stranger ship headed?” he cuts in, fury crackling in it like lightning across the sails.

Harriet stares at him, and for a second there’s a depth of hatred in her stare that Tim isn’t sure he’s ever quite felt before. He meets it, tries to return it. She’d sold Martin. He’d kill her, he thinks, if he believed for a second that he might get away with his life if he did.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t care. If you’re that set on getting yourself killed, sooner or later they’ll all dock at the Faceless Port.”

But maybe not soon enough for Martin, Tim fills in, his limbs so stiff that he can hardly turn to walk away from her, slinging the bag over his shoulder and reaching for his borrowed coat.

“You might have been born to this,” he tells her, cursing the moment’s fruitless struggling with his arm holes for snatching the force from it. “But you’re never going to be the captain that Mike was.”

He settles Martin’s coat over his arm, and stumbles away, unsteady as a newborn fawn. He has no idea if it’s true or not, if Mike was a good captain – had been an adequate one, at least, given that his ship’s still intact, but he’d had to say _something_ , too much rage buzzing through his head to let it be, and he’d only known the one sore spot to press at.

No one stops him, or meets his eye, as he makes his teeth-gritted way up onto the deck, and then down the gangway into the trading port, turning as much fury as he can on the sign that wishes him a pleasant time in Haukston. It’s the first time that his boots have been on solid ground for weeks, and he feels abruptly surer, more confident.

“Martin,” he murmurs, as he follows the vague line of people moving towards the town itself. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

He knows. Of course he does. It’s what he would have done, in Martin’s position – if it was Martin that they’d been asking for, not him. But he still hates the decision, plans to tell him so in no uncertain terms when he finds him. Maybe he’ll kiss him first, but that’s beside the point.

The port market is busy, lined with stalls and shops, brightly coloured in an effort to draw attention, the air thrumming with music from a small band that play on the other side of the square. Tim moves towards the ones closer to the dock, with the best view of the sky beyond, and steps up to the one without a queue, staring down the trader minding it.

“Have you seen a Stranger ship passing through here?”

* * *

Martin makes no progress. There are no weaknesses in the boards for him to push at, nothing that he could fashion into a wedge to stop the door from closing properly, nothing he could use as a weapon against his captors. His cell stays locked, and dark, and cold, and he spends the rest of the night shivering and sleepless on the slab of bed.

The morning brings with it a kind of dull, dingy light that he would have taken to be twilight, except that it never shifts, just stays a solid and uncomfortable grey as the day draws on. He takes advantage of it to search the room again, but all he manages to find is a small scrap of dark green thread in the corner, that looks like it might be from someone’s clothes. He picks it up, even though he can see that it’s nothing helpful, and wonders about who might have brought it here.

Perhaps it had come from a coat, made by a friend or a lover, or bought for them from a tailor at a market. Maybe it had belonged to a proper crew member, like the ordinary hands on Mike’s ship, who had left it long ago, or been taken by the Stranger, made into something else, something that skirts the edge of uncanny in the way that Danny does, or perhaps they’d been broken down for materials, or fashioned into one of the tall, silent, spindling things that works the deck. 

His own thread, he remembers, sits in his pocket, where Tim had put it, what feels like years ago. The one that Mike had given him. He drops the green one and reaches for it, traces his fingers over the edge of it, and quietly hopes that Tim’s on the path home now, that he’s not going to think on Martin for too long.

Absently, he pulls it out, and starts to wind it around his fingers in the way that Mike had been trying to teach him, tries to swallow a lump in his throat as he does so. His eyes well all the same, those soft hours in the cabin playing against his mind, fading into sharper ones out on deck. Whether the point had been for him to learn or for Mike to find intimacy with him easier, he misses it, from the shade of the sky to the warmth of their skin against his. There had been a kind of poetry in the way that Mike had talked, when he’d tried to explain it, a love even in hesitation, and Martin could have listened for hours.

He angles his hands, and for a second, he thinks that he can see a faint shimmering between his fingers, the way that there had been when Mike had tried to teach him. It’s gone almost instantly, so fleeting that he’s almost certain that he’d imagined it, a trick of poor light and sleepless night, but still he finds himself looking between the door and the thread and back again, wondering.

Mike, he’s sure, would have been able to tear the lock apart in a heartbeat, explain to it the years that it would take to travel from one side of the keyhole to the other, and have it splinter itself over the impossibility, or pull the space beneath the door wide enough for him to step through. But he’s not Mike, and he couldn’t manage it even with Mike’s hands on his to guide him.

It’s something to try, though. Better than standing around in that cramped, dark room, waiting to be killed and wondering at what point his claustrophobia might start to threaten the rest of him.

He goes to the door, and starts to make those patterns again with the thread, thinks on scale and shrinking and of finding the infinite in the mundane. There’s nothing. Keeps being nothing, up until the door starts to open inwards, leaving him scrambling backwards, almost dropping the threads in his hurry to stuff them back into his pocket before Danny can see them. Manages, he thinks, because when he finally looks up, Danny is considering him like an exhibit at the museum, holding out a hunk of bread in his direction.

“I thought you might need to eat,” he says, and gives it a small wiggle to emphasise it, like he’s trying to tempt an anxious dog into taking it. Martin considers it, and wonders whether he really has the option to be picky about that kind of thing at the moment. Maybe the crust doesn’t seem quite right, a little too perfect, but Danny decides when he eats, what he eats, and it’s that or starve.

He reaches out to take it, but as he does so, Danny’s other hand snaps out, fingers closing around his wrist again like steel bands.

“I thought you might tell me about my brother,” he says, hardly seems to notice as Martin struggles to wrench his hand back. He almost seems fevered, the most emotion Martin has ever seen from him. “It’s been a very long time. I want to hear about my brother.”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Martin retorts, and Danny’s grip tightens, hard enough to make him yelp. He’s sure that he can feel his bones grinding together, warping under the pressure. The bread drops to the floor, bouncing, somewhere past the place where he tries to pry Danny’s hold free, but he can’t seem to get any purchase. “Please, don’t–”

The rest of his sentence is lost in a break of sound as Danny’s hand squeezes tighter, threatening to splinter him, and then he lets go, so abruptly that Martin stumbles away from him, almost falls.

Danny leans down to pick up the bread, gives it a brief dust off, and then offers it to Martin again.

“I’d like to hear about my brother,” he says, again, without any change to the tone. “How long have you known him?”

“Years,” Martin rasps, cradling his crushed wrist, trying to check for feeling in the fingers, permanent damage. The word feels like a betrayal, a failure – he doesn’t want to tell this thing anything about Tim, give up the man that he’s known and might have been happy with – but it pulls itself out anyway, insists that Tim is far away and getting further, that he’s safe.

“Don’t lie to me,” Danny adds, but it doesn’t feel like a threat, more like an instruction that he’d forgotten to give at the start. He steps closer with the bread, pressing it into Martin’s chest, and he takes it, unwilling to find out what might happen if he refuses.

“I won’t,” Martin mumbles, tries to cover his expression by dusting at the bread a little more, squinting at it, trying to work out if it might ever have been edible. The weight of it’s all wrong, and it doesn’t tear properly when he has a go at breaking a bit off. Maybe if he puts it down for the rats, they’ll know a way out.

“Good.” Danny beams. “How as he been?”

“Fine,” Martin says, refusing to meet his eyes. “Usually. The past few weeks have been a bit much. You had us kidnapped.”

“It was only supposed to be Tim,” Danny says, but there’s nothing in there to make it sound even a little like an apology. “But that’s all right. I like meeting Tim’s friends. They were my friends too, before. We shared everything.”

Martin hums, because Danny leaves a pause for acknowledgement, and there’s no one else to give it.

“He’ll be happier once he’s here with me,” Danny explains, more as if he feels that Tim’s experience for the past few years has been lacking, rather than out of any particular acknowledgement that Martin might care for him, need to be reassured. “We’re supposed to be together. We’re family.”

_Family isn’t everything_ , Martin wants to spit, his thoughts flashing with memories of the space where his father should have been, that his mother had filled with anger and recriminations he’d never earned. He backs away, instead, settles on the bed and tries to make himself look small, keeps checking his wrist. It’ll definitely bruise, hurt for a while, but he thinks it’ll recover.

“Soon,” Danny says, drifting after him. “You’ll see.”


	13. Chapter 13

Tim doesn’t waste time. He doesn’t have enough to risk it – when the stall-holders know nothing, he begs and scrounges enough coins together to head into the local tavern, a washed-out old building with a faded sign displaying no name and an almost unrecognisable image of a disembodied head. His questions there are more suspiciously received, among the groups who had been holding the stalls the previous night, and he takes that as a good sign. The patrons don’t want to talk about it, and he doesn’t blame them, but he won’t let them keep their silence either. He can’t afford to. Instead, he buys a drink, and he asks, insists.

What he learns, from people who hope that if they just tell him what he wants to know, he’ll go away, is that they’re near enough to the Faceless Port that they’ll only ever see Stranger ships passing in two directions. That they haven’t seen any travelling away in days. That he’s a fool to think of going near it.

He steals. It’s not difficult – the patrons only get more drunk, and if Tim leans in and palms a couple of coins while they’re scrabbling to get enough together to pay for their evenings, they don’t notice. The staff do, but aside from one look from the barman, which he meets with a stare of his own, level and cold enough to tell them it’s not worth the fight he’ll give them if they interfere, they let him go about his way.

Some of it goes into the tavern’s coffers, anyway, buying drinks for those who tell him what he needs to hear. The rest he keeps back, and the subject of his questions changes – towards weapons and explosives, an unsettling combination with his most winning smile.

After a few hours of it, one of the barmaids comes over and takes his arm.

“We don’t want you hear,” she tells him, hushed enough that the other drinkers won’t overhear, but still sharp and firm.

“Charming,” Tim comments, with a grin that feels and looks more like a snarl. “And there I was thinking that I was bringing a bit of sparkle to the establishment.”

“You can take your business elsewhere,” she says, with a glare. “There’s a woman who sells the kind of thing you’re looking for a few streets over. Look for the sign with the mushrooms, and don’t come back here. Understand?”

“Of course,” Tim says, in what should be a pleasant, open timbre, but he can feel that it’s ragged and sticking around the edges.

He doesn’t look back as he leaves the tavern. He can sense its glow against his back, hear raucous raised voices, full of the pleasantries of the evening, and he wants to go back, smash every single one of them to pieces, until they can’t make those sounds anymore.

The sky overhead is still grim and overcast, stretching out ahead of him, and Tim takes a second to look up at it, remember how it had felt, out and high and with the ship steady beneath him, the warmth of Martin next to him and Mike’s comfortable distance on the other side of the room, the only sound their breathing and the scratch of Mike’s pen in his log book.

He’ll fly again, he thinks, with grim certainty. Maybe not like that, but he’s going to get Martin, and take the both of them home to Jon, and if the world wants to stop him it will need to put him down.

The apothecary’s shop that the barmaid had directed him to is dimly lit, closely-clustered shelves blotting out what little of the day beyond comes spilling through the window. There’s a young man at the counter, his hair dyed a dark, unnatural black, and he considers Tim through narrowed eyes that remind him, for one unexpectedly painful instant, of Jon.

“I’m here to buy,” Tim tells him, shortly, striding towards him. He raises his pouch of stolen money, gives it a brief, pointed shake.

The man waits, silent, for long enough to be insolent, and then turns, and rings a small bell that’s tucked away behind the counter.

There’s movement, above, the ceiling creaking, and Tim tenses. Looking up, he forces himself to relax at the sight of an elderly man, shuffling down the stairs. He’s dark-skinned and scarred, has clearly lived another life before this one, wind-bitten and dangerous. As he reaches them, assesses Tim, he seems to stand a little taller, a little surer.

“What do you want?” he asks, taking up a place behind the counter.

“The Stranger took my lover,” Tim says, finds it easier than he should do, every word held up by the same force that’s been keeping him moving since Harriet had woken him. “I want to get him back. I was told that you might have the tools that could help me do that.”

“What kind of thing were you thinking?” the man says. “The lady of the house is out, but Gerry and I can probably help you.”

“Explosives,” Tim tells him, with a sharp, unfelt smile. “I want to take the whole ship down. And the port too, if I can, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Passage there, too, if you know how I might get it.”

“You won’t find many ships going that way,” the man says, carefully neutral. “Just supply vessels.”

“That will do nicely.” Tim says. “I’d like to know when the next one leaves.”

“You’re aware that you’re going to get yourself killed?” The younger man – Gerry – has a spiteful tick in his voice that sets Tim’s hackles on edge.

“So I’ve been told,” Tim says, and he puts the money down on the counter, hard enough for the noise to snap out across the room like a gunshot. “But I don’t think that’s any of your business. This is your business. What I choose to do with whatever I buy from you is up to me.”

“Quite right.” The older man picks up the bag, weighs it in his hand. “I suppose you came by all this perfectly legally.”

“Not your business either,” Tim says, with entirely false pleasance. “Are you going to help me, or not?”

The man pauses, stuck in thought for a moment, and then he starts to move, leaning down to rifle along the shelves. Gerry watches Tim as he does, eyes narrowed and distrustful, and one hand out of view. Tim’s sure it must be near a gun of some kind, but can’t bring himself to care. Any resemblance between him and Jon is gone now – Jon’s not the most sensitive of people, but he’s certainly not callous, either.

Tim misses him, misses the certainty he’d use to do even the absolute worst thing possible, those rare genuine smiles, even the dry derisive comments. He’d have something to say about this, snarling and smarting, and then he’d join in, and Tim would feel a thousand times better to have him there.

The older man finally straightens up, and lays out two boxes on the countertop, inviting Tim to take a look with a gesture. Tim does, keeps his distance as best he can, half-theorising that they might be trying to trap him, steal all the money that he’s managed to put together, that they’ll dispose of his corpse in pieces, and Jon will never know what happened to either of them.

There’s no rush of violence. Just the contents of the boxes, sitting inside and making no move to harm anyone yet. The first contains a thick, solid lump of what looks like clay, and a smaller contraption of gears and buttons that he expects is some kind of enchanted detonator. In the other, there’s a small, discrete pistol, not dissimilar to the one that he’d had jabbing into his back, not too long ago. It would fit into his sleeve, and still take chunks out of anyone who tried to stop him.

“We’ll show you how to use them,” the older man says. “There’s some time for you to practice before the next supply ship leaves in the morning. How long have you been travelling, Mr...?”

“Stoker,” Tim says, shortly. He thinks, a moment too late, that maybe he shouldn’t have, that maybe they’re supposed to be on the lookout for him too, that they might sell him on the same way that Harriet Fairchild had Martin. “Much too long.”

The man just smiles and extends his hand. There’s something flinty in the expression – he’s sure that they’re sure they’re sending him to his death. Knows that he won’t be dissuaded, and is willing to accept it.

“Dekker,” he says. “Mr Stoker, you have a deal.”

* * *

_Dear Sasha_ , Jon writes, his hand aching around the pen and rendering the letters too shakily. _I know it has been a long time since my last letter, and I’m sorry for that. A lot has been happening, and I am only been able to put down part of it. As briefly as I can: Elias is no longer in control of the ship, but he claims that he has had people capture Martin and Tim, and is holding them. He claims that they’ll be hurt if he is not reinstated soon. He wants me to help him._

_Melanie won’t let that happen. I don’t want it to either, but I don’t know what else I can do for them. We’ve been through all of Elias’ documents, and we can’t find anything more to tell us where they might be._

_Elias says I love them. I don’t know. My memories of them come so easily, and hurt so much, and it doesn’t feel wrong to say, but I don’t know if I have a place with them. Relationships have always been difficult. I know the attitude is that it’s better to try these things and fail, but I don’t know that that’s true._

_I shouldn’t worry, not until I’ve got them back. We’ll work it all out. So I keep telling myself, but it’s all I can think about. I do promise that I’ll get it all thought through before we get back to you – I won’t be back without them._

_I hope everything is going well with you, and that Martin’s creatures and the museum have not been giving you too much trouble. If you have chosen to abandon the whole thing, I hope that is suiting you well, but also that you have kept up some way for these letters to find you, otherwise our correspondence may be rather difficult._

Jon leans back for a moment, lets out what feels like the longest sigh of his life, and tears the unfinished letter down the middle. He doesn’t know what more he should be saying – the writing is an an exercise for him in parsing and puzzling through his own feelings, and it’s not something that he would have send anyway. Sasha deserves better than him trying to get her to soak up his conflicted feelings like a sponge.

It’s not a luxury that he’s going to have for too much longer. The supply of paper they have on board is shrinking steadily, unless he wants to try scratching out his missives on the backs of Elias’ reports and files, and he doesn’t want Elias’ hand anywhere near either the museum or his tangled emotions. 

He should be prioritising writing to Sasha, but it’s not as if he has anything new to say – just more wretched promises, an insistence that he’ll get Tim and Martin back that she must be able to recite in her sleep by now, the script settling over the backs of her eyelids when she tries to rest. He can offer his continued life, and while he imagines that she would tell him even that’s worth the money it takes to send it, he couldn’t bring himself to stop at that.

He’s not sure he should be telling her in any further detail about what had happened with Elias. Mutinies are frowned upon, though whether or not they are outright illegal depends entirely on the whims of Simon Fairchild, who apparently cares little for the affairs of ships that are not flying under his banner. He doubts that Melanie would ever be called up on charges over it, and almost certainly not him. Justice is a thing for local courts or ships’ captains to decide, and only goes before the court of the Vast in the most extreme cases.

It’s probably not worth the trouble anyway. He sits and plays with his pen, rolling it in his fingers, and tries not to think about Elias, about the exact steps that he would need to take to get to him. He’d get there, he knows, and he would get nothing more than threats and mockery and manipulation. He’s too careful to let anything slip about where his hired people might have taken Tim and Martin, is too aware that they are the only thing that is keeping him alive to risk giving them up.

He catches himself scratching out that stylised eye on one torn fragment of paper, and wonders idly if it might be possible to go over Elias’ head, see if the Beholding magic might be able to help him. Perhaps he could talk to Elias some more, make him think of the answers he’s looking for, and then just reach into his head and take them. The idea is appealing, seems to glow in his head, his magic demanding to be exercised like a slowing muscle. 

It might be worth a try, but there’s a guard on Elias’ office now, to discourage any further looting. They can’t afford to lose any further hands to any traps they might have missed, Melanie had said, and it had been clear enough that the only reason Jon himself hasn’t been called up to help fly the ship is that he’s so inexperienced that he’d just make things worse.

Jon sighs, and scratches out Sasha’s name again. Stares at it, and tries to remember the shape of her face. It has been so very long, but he thinks he can still find the edges of her smile there, a faintest impression of a person, who he cares for and misses.

It’s better to think of her than the others – when he reaches for Tim, wrestling with his own sluggish mind, he finds the press of wooden boards around him, darkness, and a slow, bubbling anger that sits in his chest like cooling magma. Fear, too, one that he’s trying to burn out of himself. Then there’s Martin, who seems to be growing fainter, slipping into a space that Jon can’t recognise.

Jon tightens his hold on his thoughts, and begins to write again.

_Sasha. Please forgive that I haven’t written in a while. So much has been happening here, and I would write it all down for you, but I need to conserve my paper. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back. Hope everything is well with you, and that Martin’s creatures are not giving you too much trouble._

_Yours as ever,_

_Jonathan Sims._

* * *

No one seems to notice Tim. They should – for all that he’s careful, slinks up the gangway onto the Stranger ship sticking as close as he can to the shadows, he’s still feels painfully exposed there. It’s dark, yes, the middle of the night – he’d lost most of the day curled up in the hull of a supply ship, shivering despite wearing Martin’s coat on top of his own – but he’s not silent, not by any means, too disoriented by the lack of light to stop himself from tripping every now and again.

The shapes that move slowly back and forth across the deck seem unconcerned by his presence anyway. Make no move towards him, simply continue in their given patterns, slouching and swaying to their posts. Perhaps, Tim thinks, they just haven’t been given any senses to notice him with. Their faces are smooth enough, with only faint depressions where the features should be.

He tries to keep out of what should be their line of sight anyway. It’s difficult – there’s seemingly no reason or organisation to their patrolling, their tasks completed at what seem to be random intervals. They check the sails, the masts, as if preparing the ship for departure – though there’s none of the frantic all-hands activity going on that Tim would have associated with that – and they do it repeatedly. He knows from experience that a sailor only needs to examine the knots that hold them in port so many times before casting off, but by his count it’s happened six or seven times just in the few scant minutes he’s been aboard.

There’s plenty of time, he tells himself.

First, he lays some of the charges around the deck – one lump of the clay stuff at the base of each mast, and another at the steering column. That will do a fair job of crippling the ship, without taking it from the sky. His plan is to get Martin away by the same route that he’d arrived, tucked into the hull of a supply ship, and he has no intention of this one being able to follow them, but he also doesn’t want to sign their death warrants, if something goes wrong and the explosives go off before they’re able to get clear.

He hopes it’ll work as a warning. A threat. As much as the idea of destroying the whole port appeals, glimmers in his thoughts like thoughts of Larkrest, a promise that no one will ever come after him again, that they’ll be safe, he’s not willing to risk Martin on it.

The last charge sticks easily to the forward mast, taking the shape of his fingerprints as he presses it into place, and he stays facing it for the first few paces away, making sure that it stays in place. It’s not something that he’s particularly thought on, before, but he would have said that explosives should be far more difficult to use.

That’s not something that he’s going to complain about now. He approaches the hatch down below decks, muscles tightening with the expectation that at any moment, one of those things will see him. A long, many-jointed hand will grip one of his shoulders, and fling him backwards like an insect, and that’ll be an end to all of his hopes of freedom.

His last glance shows him none of them near, so he crouches, pulls up the hatch, and slips through, closing it as quietly as he can over his head. They’re probably just not used to people trying to break in, rather than out, he thinks, descending down into a space lit by dingy, near-useless lanterns. 

There’s still no strike at his back, even when his boots hit the floor, and he darts sideways into a patch of shadow.

The smell even before he turns, a rank odour of fear and hopelessness that collects in his lungs like sediment – there’s noise, too, a soft murmuring that picks up into a low wail as Tim’s noticed. Bars, people beyond them, crushed in together so tightly that he can hardly tell where one ends and another begins. He can’t make out an end to it, the space spreading off into the dark like it fills half the ship.

Tim forces himself to move closer, squinting and shoving down the instinct to get as far away as possible, but he can’t make out anyone in the mass that looks like Martin.

He goes to the edge anyway, with a couple of fleeting glances around him for crew members. Still no sign of anyone, no rush of approaching footsteps or alarm ringing out.

The cage is secured with a heavy iron lock. Tim takes a moment to judge the size of it, and then packs the very last of his explosives into it, pieces rolled together from the edges of the packet. He hopes that it’s not enough to actually hurt any of the people inside, just what keeps them in. They don’t seem alarmed, just watch him with hollow eyes, unblinking even when he tries to offer them a grim smile. It sits wrong on his face.

“I’m looking for my friend,” he tells them, as loudly as he dares. “His name’s Martin – is he here? He would have turned up in the last day or so.”

There’s no reply. Not even the slightest of shiftings in that thick, charged atmosphere of fear that Tim can hardly breathe past. It feels like it wants to catch him, too, set him running terrified and unremembering to his death, wherever he may find it.

“Martin?” Tim tries again, raising his voice, just a fraction. There’s still nothing from the thick cluster of people on the other side of the bars, and he sighs, hangs his head for a second. That’s okay, he tells himself. It’ll be easier to get Martin out if he’s not in there, if he can extract him before he has to detonate.

He turns away, and he can feel the skin at the back of his neck prickling with their scrutiny as he leaves them.

It’s a difficult place for a thorough search. The corridors twist and turn like the ship had been built to the specifications of an excited child with a box of crayons, and he finally gives up on being able to put together a system somewhere around the engine room – he can hear it, murmuring through the wall, catches a brief glimpse of a room full of bright, burning blue threads through a door that doesn’t fit properly in its housing.

He tries checking the places against the hull, where he and Martin had been kept before, but he finds only folds of what he hopes is sail-cloth, and vats of what he thinks might be fat. Backs away without disturbing them, sure that he wouldn’t like the result of doing so.

It’s hopeless, he thinks, distantly, passing the empty rooms where he would have assumed the brig should be. He could search the whole ship, if he wanted, but it will take too long. Someone might find one of the charges, or the ship might sail, and then he and Martin will be stuck on board until an uncertain landfall. From the crates of supplies that he finds, that could be a long time away, and the more time they spend aboard, the more likely it is that they’ll be discovered.

His best chance is to find someone who still remembers how to speak, and make them tell him.

The first crew member he meets is on one of the lower levels, a roughly normal-looking shadow moving between the boxes of food as if to make sure that they’re all properly stowed. Tim watches for a moment, forcing down the last few drifts of doubt with the image of Martin’s face, and then pulls the pistol from his pocket, stepping out into the light.

“Don’t move,” he says, sharply, forcing as much anger into his voice as he can to cover the shake. “Don’t make a sound. If you cry out, I’ll shoot you, got it? I’m looking for Martin Blackwood. You’re going to take me to him. Quietly. Understood?”

The figure doesn’t move for a short while, as if it’s having to translate what he’d said from one language to another, but just when he’s about to have to choose between repeating himself and shooting, it turns. It’s almost not right, the way it does it, as if it’s being manipulated by an unseen hand, having one part of it rotated at a time.

“Tim?” it says, once it’s all facing the same way, and Tim knows that voice. Knows that face, with a certainty that makes something inside him fold in on itself.

“Danny?” he whispers, and the word makes no sense. It’s impossible, something he’d lost years ago.

“Tim!” Danny steps forward, throws his arms wide to embrace him. Tim lets him, nearly collapses into his hold, his eyes blurring, a gawky teenaged version of himself sobbing inside his chest.

He hardly even feels it, when Danny takes the gun gently from his hands.


	14. Chapter 14

Martin is starting to drift. Finds his way into a light sleep, in fits and starts – he can’t stay there. The nightmares come to prowl through his head the moment that he closes his eyes, promising him sights and sensations that he would rather forget, and it’s too cold for him to. Even if he doesn’t dream, he ends up shaking so hard that he wakes himself up again, sure that frost flowers are forming across his skin. Every noise in the corridor startles him upright again, leaves him staring towards the door, expecting at any moment that Danny will appear there, every angle of him wrong in the half-light.

By the time that it really does open, he’s half-convinced that he’s imagining it anyway. His whole body aches, dull and leaden, and there’s a foggy dizziness in his head that’s a world away from the clean, clear vertigo that he remembers from Mike. The dim glow from the lantern beyond is too much for him, but he can’t seem to remember how to blink away from it, just lets it thud into his head like a blow, and stares.

There are two shapes, this time – the first, he recognises as Danny, as familiar from the nightmares as he is from his presence in the waking world, and the second is already far too close, blurring through Martin’s vision. There’s a grip on him, before he can process what that might mean, arms wrapping tightly around him, and pulling him in close against them.

“Martin,” they say, and he flinches as he recognises Tim’s voice, a breaking whisper against his ears. “ _Martin_.” He pulls back, for a moment, and Martin can finally make out his face – it’s soft, far too soft, like it’s been holding its shape for far too long. His eyes are a little too bright, too wavering, but it’s him. There’s nothing odd there, nothing to make him suspect some kind of Stranger trick.

Tim kisses him, and Martin is too surprised to do anything except kiss him back, fall into the patterns he still understands. Tim’s gentle, touches him like he might shatter, a promise of safety and understanding that he’d tried to stop himself believing in.

He shouldn’t _be_ here.

“You’re freezing,” Tim murmurs, a frown settling onto his face. He glances around, towards Danny, though he doesn’t turn to face him properly, keeps both hands on Martin. “He’s cold – can you get him some blankets or something?”

Danny doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s just gazes at Tim with a fixed, sickly smile, and Martin’s stomach turns at the sight of it. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he says, stepping inside and pushing the door shut behind him, before that familiar phrase winds out of him like a music box. “We’re going to be a family again.”

Tim doesn’t listen right back – he just pulls Martin in closer again, awkwardly shrugs off a coat and settles it around his shoulders. Martin stares, still blank, unable to force his thoughts to catch up with what’s happening, and shivering harder where the residual warmth of the coat starts to sink into him.

“It’s cold in here,” Tim tries, and there’s a first hint of disquiet there, underlying the repeated sentiment.

“I’ll get you some blankets,” Danny assures him, his attention still unwavering, unblinking.

“Right,” Tim says, and he looks back to Martin, forces a difficult smile. “Good.” He starts to shed the other coat, trying to wrap that one around him, too – it won’t stay, slips off, and he holds it there, insistent. “It’s freezing out there tonight, you’re going to need this.”

“Tim,” Martin manages, hates that it sounds as lost and confused as he feels. “Tim? What’s…”

“I came to get you,” Tim says, a little too fierce, too bright, for Martin to hear it directly. He half-turns back towards Danny, who seems to light up at the attention, almost looks real. “Martin and I are going to go now.”

“You only just got here,” Danny says, his face falling. “I’ve been looking for you for so long – see?” He digs something out of a pocket, holds it out towards Tim.

Martin stares through it, trying to make his eyes focus. It’s a scrap of paper, covered in text that he can’t make himself read, but he doesn’t need to – he knows its layout, the shape of the paragraphs. Jon had made a similar clipping, less ragged at the edges. It’s a review, of the Larkrest museum, by a fairly prominent journalist, who had given them her recommendation. She’d been interested and honest and a lot of their newer visitors had turned out to be her readers.

The article mentions all four of them by name.

“That’s – that’s how you found me,” Tim says, the pace of it glacial. “You sent the raid.”

“You’re supposed to be with me,” Danny announces, tucking the paper away again, and looking back at Tim like he’s expecting to be told he’d done a good job.

“Will you let Martin go?” Tim asks, pulling the coat up again, even though it’s not slipped so far down this time. “It’s me you were after, so… let him go. I’ll stay.”

“He’s your friend,” Danny says, then blinks, amends it. “Your lover.”

“Yeah.” Tim draws him in closer for a moment, and then pushes him forwards, towards the door. “He’s not your family, so you can let him go home–”

“You don’t want him here?” Danny gives a slow nod. “We can put him with the others–” 

“No,” Tim corrects, and his eyes are wider now, like they’re starting to take in all the little bits that don’t quite fit, are terrified of the picture they’re coming up with. “No, that’s not what I said. He needs to go home.”

“We’ll find a use for him,” Danny says. “Nothing ever goes to waste here.”

“No,” Tim repeats, harder. “No, I want you to let him go. Put him off the ship.”

“He’d fall,” Danny says, and then he glances at Martin, carefully considering. “No one would be able to use him there.”

“I don’t want anyone to _use_ him!” Tim snaps. He pulls Martin back again, plants himself between him and Danny, his grip too tight, shoulders squared. “What the _fuck_ happened to you?”

“I came home,” Danny says, simply. “I don’t understand. If you don’t want him, we’ll find you something better.”

“No, no, you’re not listening.” There’s an edge of despair in Tim’s tone now. Martin reaches for his hand, but finds only a closed fist, that tries to usher him back when he tries to hold it. “Of course I want him.”

“Then we’ll keep him,” Danny says, and he blinks at Tim, confused. “I want you to be happy here.”

“I don’t–” Tim takes a second, breathes, struggling to formulate something. “Danny. What would make me most happy would be for Martin to be let free. Back to Larkrest, where you sent that ship to come and get me. I want him to be able to live out the rest of his life there, like he did before you interfered. Understand?”

Danny shakes his head, and Martin can’t tell if he’s doing it out of a genuine lack of understanding, or if there’s something more sinister in there, if he’s decided to play.

“If he makes you happy, you should have him,” he says, and he smiles, eyes flickering to Martin for a moment, and then back to Tim. “It looks like he made you happy. You were glad to see him.”

Tim’s head drops, and he pinches his nose for a moment, clearly troubled. He must be exhausted, Martin thinks, wonders if he’s slept at all since he’d left him behind on Mike’s ship, how long ago exactly that had been.

“Tim,” he says, and he tries to put force on the word. It still feels half-missing, not something he can make be heard. “I’m not–”

“Yes,” Danny interrupts, speaks louder, more surely, as if he has the answers to everything. “We’ll keep him, if that’s what you want. If you don’t want, I’ll find him somewhere else.”

“Fine,” Tim says, his voice a harsh, pained whisper. “Fine, we’ll keep him. Just – just bring us some blankets, okay? It’s freezing in here.”

Danny nods, and then backs out of the room again. He closes it, locks it behind him, and the second that the noise of his footsteps fades, Tim turns back to Martin, snatching him back into his hold, too tight, too desperate.

“I’m sorry,” he says, murmurs it like it’s the only thing left in him. “I’m so sorry.”

* * *

Another day, another port, and still nothing Jon can do. Melanie is hardly any more sympathetic than Elias had been, though at least he thinks he can believe it, coming from her, when she tells him that she’s taking every step possible. Winces, because she knows that he’s heard that before, and pushes into explaining herself.

The rest of the crew is heading ashore, she says. First, to escort Emma and the rest of Elias’ supporters as far away from the dock as possible, and to keep them there until it’s time for the ship to leave. Second, to replace them by recruiting more hands, take the strain off their sailors. The rest will be asking as many people as possible about Stranger ships. The two of them, and only the two of them, will be waiting back to guard the ship.

She doesn’t tell him that it’s because she trusts him. He’s not sure that she does – she can trust his motivations, and that must be enough. Enough for her to hand him a pistol that he has no idea how to use, and leave him standing at the gangway while she goes to check around the rest of the ship.

As she circles, he stares out into the port market, trying to pick out the familiar faces of what’s now Melanie’s crew. He’d given his brief letter to Sasha to a woman named Fiona, and asked her to pick up more paper, if she could. Melanie had given her a handful of coins, enough to get it done, so he assumes that that’s what’s happening, but he’d lost sight of her before he could follow her properly to the mail office, distracted by another group of sailors, passing a little too close to their gangway.

Every few minutes, he checks around to make sure he can still see Melanie. There are overblown visions in his head of people with ropes and, presumably, a love of impracticality, climbing out under the ship, waiting to swarm it from the other side, where they won’t be expecting an attack from.

It stays silent, save for the whistle of the wind around the masts, and Melanie’s course continues around the deck uninterrupted, up to the steering column, where she runs her hands over it as if trying to solidify in her mind the idea that it’s hers now.

Briefly, he entertains the idea of taking the ship himself, sailing it out on a heading for the Faceless Port and all the worst rumours in the sky, waiting for the whispers about Captain Nikola Orsinov to rise into screams. It ends in a violent, reality-splintering crash before he can get it out of port, and he’s sure that if he actually tried it, he wouldn’t even make it as far as that.

There’s a movement from the jetty, and he takes a tense step closer to the side, watches as a woman dressed in practical skyfaring gear starts up the gangway towards him. She’s carrying enough weapons to try to take it by herself, a rifle slung over one shoulder and a pistol at her hip, but her hands are well away from them, and she tips a curt nod to Jon as she approaches.

Jon glances around Melanie, uncertainty clicking in his voice box. She hadn’t told him what to do about visitors, just to shoot anyone trying to take the ship, and he hadn’t realised that he might not necessarily recognise that when he sees it.

“Melanie!” he calls, instead, his head swinging between where he’d last seen her and the approaching woman.

She’s by his side faster than he would have believed, holding out her own gun, steady and unwavering, though it doesn’t suit her as well as the knives did – she’d been so comfortable with them that they might as well have been a part of them.

“Stop,” she says, moving to intercept at the top of the gangway. “What’s your business here?”

The strange woman’s mouth twists, and her hand starts to shift a little way towards her pistol. Jon scrabbles for his own, hopes that just pointing it in the right direction will be enough.

“Where’s Elias Bouchard?” she demands, voice sharp and snapping like a whip.

“This ship is under new management,” Melanie says, enough satisfaction in it that it only makes the woman’s glare hotter.

“That’s _not_ what I asked,” she growls.

“What do you want with him?” Jon asks, stepping closer to Melanie, trying to make it as clear as he can that they have the advantage here.

“That is between me and him,” the woman says.

“Well, you’re not seeing him,” Melanie informs her. “So you talk to us, or you don’t talk at all. Understand?”

The woman takes a moment, considers them, and then unhooks something from her belt, and hurls it down onto the deck beside them. It lands heavily, enough that Jon thinks it might have left a mark on the deck. He braces, half-expecting it to explode, but it just stays where it had hit, so solid that the wind can only stir at the cloth.

“Tell him he can have his fucking money back,” she snarls. “Since we didn’t get the job done.”

“What job?” Jon goes closer without meaning to, only half-aware of Melanie trying to nudge him backwards.

“That’s his business,” the woman says, with a dismissive glance at him. He’s sure he must look much as he had done in Larkrerst, all that time ago, all desperation even if no longer any ash. “He’ll know what it’s about.”

“You don’t seem very happy with him,” Melanie remarks, and her pistol is canting down, just slightly, like she’s recognising a kindred spirit.

“Well, no,” the woman spits. “My partner’s dead, because of the fucking fool’s errand he sent us on.”

“He wanted you to get Tim and Martin,” Jon pushes, can’t keep it down or the anger out of it. 

“I suppose you’re Jon,” she says, one eyebrow twitching upwards.

“Yes.” Jon shakes his head, impatient, trying to move her along. “Have you seen them?” He crouches down, scrabbles the bag off the deck, so hurriedly that he almost drops the pistol. He holds it out to her with a clink of coins, arm dipping with the weight of it. “Tell me – you can have this, have whatever, I just need to know – are they all right? Where did you see them?”

“On a fucking Vast ship,” she says. “Elias _told_ us they were taken by the Stranger. We weren’t prepared. Daisy and I tried to get them out, but the captain and Daisy went overboard. Then the rest of the crew was there.”

“The Vast,” Jon echoes, and with it a slight easing of his chest, a second-hand weight sloughing away from him. “How did they seem?”

“Well, they didn’t want to come with me, if that’s what you’re asking,” the woman says. “Used your name and everything. Captain seemed to like them.”

“But were they _hurt_?” Jon presses, ignoring a quelling gesture from Melanie.

“Not that I saw,” the woman says. “Been a few days though, so that might have changed.”

“Right.” Jon exhales, and then tries to lift the bag a little higher. “Thank you.”

“Keep the money,” the woman says, curls her lip at it. “It’s not worth what happened to Daisy. Tell Elias that I came, and that if I see him again he’ll get a hole in his head for his trouble.”

“What name should we give him?” Melanie asks, returns her own pistol to its holster.

“Basira,” Basira says, and then she turns, stalks down the gangway without a backward glance.

“A Vast ship,” Jon repeats, turning to look at Melanie, his chest bursting with possibility. “Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions, perhaps we can find them now, if…” It tails off, as he remembers the abrupt change in their feelings, the openness snatched away and folding down into a tight, dense fear. “I don’t think they’re with the Vast anymore.”

Melanie offers a grim smile, and claps him on the shoulder.

“Maybe not,” she says, her eyes gleaming. “But at least now we know who to ask.”

* * *

There is too much to feel. It’s like Tim’s been gutted, left with his flesh peeled back to expose him utterly, raw and bleeding. Something in him still sobs after Danny, cries like he’d done all those years ago. He’d spent years dragged along by the barbs that hope dug into his throat, and now that line’s been severed, leaves him empty. Finally found his brother again, but he’s been dead for years.

Danny had been a bright kid, spun his attention between things like a lighthouse. A little brother, in the way that all little brothers are, or so his parents had said. That _thing_ that had spun fate after fate isn’t him, is so far away from it that he can’t believe he didn’t see it sooner. It’s all just superficial, half his skin and half his memories that can’t build a true hole.

They can’t stay. He thrusts a hand into the pocket of one of the coats he’d tucked over Martin, searching for the detonator, but it’s empty. He curses, tries the other side, hoping that he’s just got confused by it, but there’s nothing there but fluff and grit. 

Maybe Danny had taken it. Tim hadn’t felt anything, but he doesn’t know what the monster might be capable of that his brother hadn’t been.

He should have known. Should have been able to stick to the plan. Hold the gun on him, make him give Martin up, and maybe take the time to put it down before they’d left, make sure that it wouldn’t come after him anymore.

Instead, he’s just back where he’d started. Back in a cell with Martin, far away from Jon and the museum and Sasha and everything he’d ever learned was home. His chest aches with it, with the weight of his own failure.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he asks, finally, and there should more fury in it. Something scorching, something to hold him upright. There isn’t. There’s only so much he can turn on Martin, who stands like a lost ghost, pale underneath the stacked coats, dark bruises standing starkly out against one wrist that he doesn’t want to see the hand shape in. “Martin – why did you do that?”

“What the fuck was _I_ thinking?” Martin echoes. Something in him seems to click back into place, a little of the vacancy around his eyes dropping away, and he stands straighter, glaring. “What the fuck were _you_ thinking, Tim? You were out, you were gone–”

“Oh, and you’re telling me that that thing genuinely thought you were me?” Tim fires back, as if his mouth is working on its own, remembers rage that he can’t feel anymore. “Was it going to stop looking.”

“No,” Martin admits. “No, but – it was a _chance_. You had a chance. I got it for you, and you just–”

“Came to rescue you,” Tim fills in, more savagely than he wants to. “And I’m sorry that I fucked it up, but at least I _tried_.”

“There was no way that I could have known that it was your brother–”

“It is _not_ my brother.”

“That it would know you by sight,” Martin amends. He glares, eyes red, and even in the dim light, Tim can make out the faint trails of tears on his cheeks. “I was trying to rescue you, too. You could have gone home, Tim. You were supposed to go home. Back to Jon and Sasha and being _safe_. You didn’t know either, so why didn’t you just _do that_?”

“Because I love you!” Tim snaps, goes to take Martin’s hands in his. Flinches away from the bruises, reaches for his face instead. His skin’s still so cold that he half-expect his tears to come to frost. “Because I love you,” he says again, more softly. “And, Martin, don’t you dare tell me you don’t love me too.”

“Of course I do,” Martin says, skims over it, like he doesn’t realise that he’s not said it before, like it’s not something that they’ve thought and accepted. “But now we’re both here and – it didn’t have to happen like this.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Well. It did. We’re here now. We’re together. And at least… that thing, still seems to want to listen to me, so – so I’m going to keep you safe.” He keeps talking, with far more confidence than he feels, while the broken thing in his head insists that he stops, before he ends up lying. “I’m not going to let him hurt you, and we’ll find a way to get out. We can blow this place, and go home, and there’ll be nothing left to come after me anymore.”

Martin sighs. Leans forwards to rest his forehead against Tim’s. Tim kisses him, because it’s easier than saying anything more. Martin’s more respondent, now, like he’s beginning to thaw out, lips parting and a soft sound rising in the back of his throat.

“You’re still freezing,” Tim murmurs. He takes one of the coats off, nudges Martin down onto the bed, then lies beside him and pulls it around them, keeping him close. Kisses him again, more briefly, and thanks whatever stars might pay attention that at least they’re not in one of those cupboards, pinned like insects against the hull and trying to breathe themselves out of panic.

Martin curls in closer, tucks himself against Tim like they would have done on Mike’s ship, and then hesitates.

“I’d rather not…” he says, trails off.

“Yeah,” Tim says, settling the coat a little more comfortably over them, a makeshift blanket. “Me neither. Don’t want that monster walking in on us. Just warm up, all right?”

The shivering subsides, eventually. Tim’s not sure how long it’ll last – he can feel his own skin starting to cool, and he expects that he’ll be as cold as Martin, soon, the frozen nights setting in over both of them.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says. It’s the kind of soft, reckless thing that he can only promise in the dark, where he can’t see all the cracks in it. “We’ll find a way.”

Martin sighs, the softest of stirrings against Tim’s shirt, and Tim tells himself that it’s acceptance. That it’s belief, that Martin trusts in that possible future. As long as he does, so can Tim. They’re going to go home, one day, and it’ll be like they never left, save for the clasp of their hands and the ghost of the conversation they’ll need to have with Jon.

Tim just has to keep the both of them alive, until they can get there.


	15. Chapter 15

They say that all air-currents lead to the Mountain. Jon had always been sceptical of it. Just another superstition, an explanation for something that no one understands, held onto for too long. He’s felt the breeze, from Larkrest and on the decks of all those passenger ships to the markets. Out on Melanie’s ship, he’s had gale-force winds try to tear him out into the sky. He’s sensed storm winds, chilling Tim and Martin’s skin and scratching at their window. There has never been any reason to their direction, no central point.

And yet, when they set a course for the court of the Vast, what Jon’s sure should be weeks of travel takes them only days.

It might, he theorises, be something to do with their engine. It had been formed, after all, in the Fairchild’s shipyards, a fragment of the Vast itself. Perhaps like attracts like, and there is something at the Mountain that pulls the ships in. It’s a distraction that he values, a handful of thoughts that aren’t wrapped through with fear, but Melanie refuses to allow him to watch the engine for any variation in its function. There’s a taboo, she says, around anyone seeing it but its technicians, and she can’t afford to upset their new hands.

He settles for trying to measure the speed of the wind, ascertain whether they’re moving more quickly than usual, but his results are inconclusive. All he knows is that they’re docking before he’s managed to formulate a proper answer, and then Melanie is calling for him to go, waiting at the top of the gangway with a small group of other crew members.

It’s not a clear day. The Mountain is immense, a single peak rising higher than the others in what’s often cited as the centre of the world, and it’s said that the view from there is breath-taking. Jon has read about scholars requesting board in the palace to study the patterns of the earth as the Buried shifts, far below them, poets who wish to fill their minds with wind and the distant promise of ocean, artists in search of inspiration sure that they will find it there and only there.

All Jon can see is the white of the clouds that wreath the peak, the shapes of other ships looming out of it, all along the crowded dock. They pass attendants, dressed in dull colours that seem to match the evening sky, trying to guide in as many vessels as possible, clusters of other crews, and Jon has to quicken his pace to keep up with Melanie, aware that it would be far too easy to lose himself out here, maybe even wander off an edge in the fog.

The road leads into what looks from its gate as if it’s the grandest building Jon has ever seen – he can’t make out much of the walls, but there’s a portcullis, heavy iron with details inscribed across it, clouds detailed at the top and below the outlines of mountains. He studies it, as Melanie talks to the gatekeeper, and then scurries after the group, when they move into the halls too soon.

The whole interior is painted, each wall its own extensive mural, a study in blue with the details picked out that Jon is sure would resolve if he could just have a moment to sit and look at them properly. When he looks up, the ceiling that arches high above his head seems to move, shades drifting over it, and it sets dizziness swirling through his head and limbs when he tries to take it in. There are constellations there, winking down at him, and he thinks that if he had the time he might be able to map them.

“Keep _up_ ,” Melanie snaps, already metres ahead. “Simon Fairchild has agreed to grant us an audience, but he can apparently be rather fickle and impatient, so it’s best to get to him as soon as possible.”

Jon sighs, but quickens his pace to follow after them. Fixes his eyes on the backs of Melanie’s boots, to try and minimise the distractions.

They’re shown into an office – or, at least, Jon thinks it’s an office, assumes it from the desk and papers that sit at the far end, but it’s far, far too big. The space would be more suited to a ballroom, could fit one of Larkrest’s festivals in it three times over and still be largely empty. The walls are painted there, too, seem to throw out an impossible distance, except for the far one, which is composed entirely of glass, providing a window that today looks out only onto cloud.

As Jon watches it, he thinks that he can see something out there, a shadow, moving through the white, but he loses sight of it as they move towards the desk.

Once they’re near enough to it, Melanie grabs him by the shoulder, and pulls him down onto his knees.

“Mr Fairchild,” she says. Carefully, painstakingly polite, more than Jon has ever heard her speak before.

There is a sigh from the desk, the scrape of a chair being pushed back. The man who stands from it is tiny, barely more than a skeleton. He would be lost, in that room, if it weren’t for his expression, makes the space even bigger in comparison. Seems as if he should be frail, but Jon knows better than to believe it – though he reaches for a stick, he doesn’t lean on it as he should. He’s brightly dressed, in loud, obnoxious colours, and his eyes are a shade of blue that Jon would never have believed possible.

“Well?” he says, voice steady and certain. “What can I do for you?”

“We want information,” Jon tells him, cutting in before Melanie can speak. “About one of your ships. The captain was killed.”

“Yes, I’m aware of it,” Fairchild nods, circling around his desk to consider them. He’s short enough that even on their knees, the tallest of their group is still of a height with him. His eyes glint, clearly seeing far more than anyone might assume. “What can you offer me in exchange?”

“I’m sorry?” Jon says. In the periphery of his vision, he can make out Melanie, gesturing for him to stop talking. Too late now, he thinks.

“From how you’ve behaved, you’re clearly quite desperate to have this information,” Fairchild says. “And it doesn’t really matter all that much to me. So – make it worth my time to give it up. It’s been a very long and tedious morning.”

“I don’t know what you want.” Jon hesitates, sure that it’s come out too wretched, that it’s far from a reasonable negotiating position. He shoots an apologetic glance Melanie’s way, but he can’t obey her silent order to stop, not now there’s a conversation happening. “You - you are the king of the world. What could _I_ possibly offer you?”

“What an excellent question!” Fairchild declares. He smiles, broadly, showing too many teeth, like it’s a pleasure to be asked. “And it is quite true that I have everything I could possibly want. Here, I am given everything I could possibly want. You know, there are people who try to think what I might like before I do, so they can give it to me? It’s been such a long time since I’ve had to take _anything_ by force. Did you know that your ship’s engines are made of people?”

“What?” All of the politeness falls away from Melanie’s voice, hard and fast.

“I’ve never made any secret of it,” Fairchild says. “I tell most of my visitors. It just doesn’t seem to become common knowledge, no matter what I do. There is so much that you can do with technology these days, I’m sure people choose to believe that it’s that, somehow, but really, the only way to get something in the air like that is with the Vast – you have to flay the infinite out of people. And they _volunteer_ for it.”

Melanie’s gestures stop. Her face is twisting, something like anger there, and Jon’s eyes flicker between her and Fairchild. He can’t read Fairchild’s face, but he knows Melanie’s, has argued with it enough times himself to recognise what’s coming and know that it’s best to interrupt it.

“What can I offer you?” he asks, again, trying to draw the conversation back. “I have _nothing_. No money, no ship, no Vast you could cut from me.”

Fairchild hums, leans down to study him a little more closely.

“You’re touched by the Eye,” he says, thoughtfully. “Maybe a little more.”

“I’d give you that if I could,” Jon tells him, regrets it for an instant, half sure that he’s going to be told that it’s absolutely possible, that it involves knives.

“Perhaps it’s best for you to simply owe,” Fairchild concludes, straightening up again. “One day I will call on you for something, and you will give it to me. If you do not then you and your loved ones will simply never hit the ground.”

“Fair enough,” Jon says, manages to keep it measured, not too eager, for all that it feels as if he’s about to be given the information for nothing – he doubts he’s ever going to _have_ something Simon Fairchild would want, and besides, from the rumours heard, he may simply forget or choose never to call it in. “The ship?”

“Yes,” Fairchild says. He reaches and reaches a sheaf of papers from his desk, starts to flip through it, unconcerned. “Michael Crew’s vessel. Attacked at port, resulting in the captain and one of the aggressors going over the side. Now captained by my granddaughter Harriet. I wouldn’t have picked her, you know, she cares too much for the fleeting. Just assumes she’s working on a grander scale because it’s politics.”

“There were two prisoners on board,” Jon says. “My… friends – do you know what happened to them? Is it possible that I could speak with your granddaughter?”

“One was traded to the Stranger,” Fairchild reads. “And the other was put off the ship in Haukston.”

Jon holds his breath for a little too long, unsure of what he might say if he allows himself to speak. There’s anger, starting to pulse through his head, not just that Tim and Martin are still gone, but that this man is so utterly unworried by it all.

“Do you know where we might find the Stranger ship that one was traded to?” he manages, finally.

Fairchild folds his papers over and returns them to his desk, smiles down at Jon as if he’s charmed by the question.

“Now, why would I know that?”

“They’re your ships,” Jon says, simply, because nothing else presents itself. “In the end.”

“Quite right,” Fairchild muses. “When it left Harriet’s, it was travelling due west, so I imagine it’s made landfall at the Faceless Port. You could likely still catch it, but – do consider that the Stranger has a great many uses for the human body. Very few of them involve keeping it alive for a protracted period of time.”

* * *

It’s a difficult night. Danny’s as good as his word, and brings them enough blankets that Tim is able to construct a nest on that tiny bed, and a lantern, too, so at least they can make out more of each other’s faces in the gloom.

Martin knows he should feel something – anger, fear. Even joy, an absurd happiness that Tim cares enough for him to come after him, that he would try to fight down if he had any of it, convince himself that it’s inappropriate, remind himself that they’re both in danger and it’s not right. But none of it comes. He just lies there through the night, too empty and exhausted to muster anything.

Tim doesn’t let him go. Martin wakes in the morning with his arms still tight around him, so close that he can’t sense anything else. For a few bleary moments, he’s not aware of any of the rest of it, can almost believe that they’re home.

“Morning,” Tim murmurs, soft against Martin’s hair. It’s plain from his voice, rough and scratching, that he hasn’t slept at all.

“Morning,” Martin replies. He shifts, his limbs restless with the surety that he should get up, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s hardly as if Danny has given any indication that he’d let him out for exercise, although maybe it would be different if it was Tim asking.

Tim kisses him, takes his time over it, like he’s missed it in the time they’ve been apart as much as Martin has. Martin sighs into his touch, wishes it were easier to take peace from their being together again. Tim breaks it off first, at a sound from the corridor beyond their cell, pushing himself up and scrambling to place himself between Martin and the door.

“Good morning!” Danny declares, smile wide as a theatre mask’s. He strides into the centre of the room, pushing the door shut with one foot, a tray balanced precariously on one arm. “I brought you breakfast.”

“Right,” Tim says, and Martin can hear the effort that it’s costing him to respond in kind, a grimace to a grin. “Thank you.”

“I can get you anything else you need, too,” Danny says. He makes his way over, lays the tray down at the bottom of the bed, doesn’t seem to notice that they pull away from him as he does. “I think you need a table. I’ll see what I can find.”

Martin shares a glance with Tim, one that he hopes tells him to just indulge him, and wonders briefly what kind of table Danny might come up with. It’s possible that there’s a normal one, somewhere, but given what he’d come up with in place of bread, he doesn’t trust it. There are too many materials on board this ship that aren’t wood or wire, and too many people who are made of that and nothing else.

“Eat!” Danny says, makes an ushering gesture with his hands. “I don’t want you to go hungry.”

Tim bats Martin’s hand down when he reaches, covers it by lacing their fingers together, and takes something from the plate himself first. Trying to protect him, Martin supposes, make sure that Danny’s not trying to poison him, that he’s not trying to give Martin anything that he wouldn’t Tim, but it still rankles, just a little.

He comes up with an apple, that is at least far more convincing than the dubious bread that Martin had been faced with before. It looks like an apple, wonky on one side, a variation of oranges and greens across the surface, and not at all like what someone might draw if told to. He bites into it, chews slowly for a minute, his eyes resting on Danny, who looks back with that fixed smile. Then he nods, and passes the rest over to Martin.

It tastes like an actual apple, too – the skin sticks in his teeth, and he presses it out with his tongue. It’s the first thing he’s eaten in too long, and it feels like the juice flows straight into his veins, bringing back all the feeling that he’s lost. He leans into Tim’s shoulder for a moment, enjoying the food and the contact and trying to forget the rest of it.

Danny doesn’t let him. He sits down on the other side of the tray, studies them like he’s never seen anything like them.

“Aren’t you having any?” Tim asks, tensing. It’s a deflection, something shoved out into the space between them, and it at least seems to work – Danny looks back at him, more conversational again.

“I don’t eat like that anymore,” Danny explains, vague enough that Martin knows it’ll turn up in his nightmares. “So it’s all for you!”

“You’ve changed a lot,” Tim says, trying to cover the slightest of winces. “I know you used to like oranges.”

“I did!” Danny glances down at the tray, abruptly frowning. “Did you want me to bring you some of those? We don’t have any on the ship yet but I could make one.”

“No,” Tim interjects, too fast. “No, that’s fine – you know I always liked apples better anyway.”

“You did!” Danny agrees, and settles back into his smile. “And I have changed, a lot – it’s been a very long time – but it’s all good. I want to show you. I think that would be good for you. It would make you happier, and I want us to be a family again.”

“We’re already a family,” Tim tries, uneasy, and Martin lightly traces his thumb across his knuckles, trying to offer what little comfort he can. “We never stopped being brothers.”

It looks like it was the right thing to say. Danny folds his hands against his chest in a way that is only just unnatural, and fidgets.

“I still want to show you,” he says. “I learned so much here. Captain Orsinov is great. I’m her first mate! I could take you to meet her if you like, she enjoys new people.”

“Maybe later,” Tim suggests, and the reluctance in his voice is so obvious to Martin, somehow manages to pass Danny by utterly, no flicker in his expression at the sound of it. “Martin and I still have to get settled in.”

Danny glances sideways at Martin, like he’s only just remembered that he’s there. He doesn’t look away, an intensifying stare that seems to weigh up every part of him, judges him wanting. It finds the place where he and Tim are holding onto one another.

“Is he family too?” Danny asks, and it feels off. Like he’s testing.

“He’s _my_ family,” Tim says. Martin tries not to like the sound of it, to be pleased with it. Tim’s picking his way through a thicket of a conversation, trying to choose whatever option will get them the least scratched, and it’s not right for Martin to feel that warm glow about any of it. He snuffs it out with a single glance towards Danny.

“That means he’s my family as well,” Danny says, slowly. “That’s how family works.”

“Maybe,” Tim says. He’s wound too tight, doesn’t want this line of conversation to go any further – he’s probably getting tired of the whole thing, can only keep up the charade of interaction with this thing for so long before the cracks will start to show.

“Thank you for the food,” Martin says, softly. Danny nods, but his eyes don’t lift from where they sit, fixed on their clasped hands.

* * *

Jon hardly sees the Mountain, on their way out. The splendid paintings, the beautiful art, the shifting ceiling – none of it seems to touch him like it had on the way in. He’s trapped inside his own head, finally granted direction, but only along with another push to understand that in the end, he may just be retrieving Tim and Martin’s corpses from the deck of some new Stranger ship, trying to pick their skins out of Orsinov’s sails.

“Jon?” Melanie says, dropping back to walk beside him as they step outside, into the fog again. She’s troubled herself, her face heavy with what Simon had told them about the engines, but that’s not a debate that he has the strength to weigh in on. “What’s wrong? We got what you wanted, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” he says. “We did. But, what he said...”

“Well, we knew that was a risk,” Melanie reminds him, a little sharper than she needs to be. He tells himself she doesn’t mean it. “You came chasing after them anyway – and besides, can’t you tell whether or not they’re dead?”

“I’ve not heard it from anyone like _him_ before.” It feels foolish, to say it, but he doesn’t know how else to put it. Simon Fairchild is the kind of the sky, owns everything that they can see, and if _he_ says that Tim and Martin are going to die, it’s near-impossible not to take it as fact. “And I can reach out all I like, but there’s nothing I can _do_ about what I feel from them.”

“We’ll worry about the future when it gets here,” Melanie tells him. They’re coming within sight of the dock where they’d left the ship, and she turns them towards it. She’s not got her whole mind on the conversation, seems to be counting the number of vessels in the harbour instead. The number of lives in them, Jon supposes. “We’ll sail for the Faceless Port. There’s nothing else we can do, except try to get there before anything can happen.”

“And what are we going to do when we get there?” Jon quickens his pace, trying to buoy Melanie along with him, get back to the ship as soon as possible.

“We have _guns_ , Jon,” Melanie reminds him. She pauses, as they approach the gangway, considering her ship like she’s never seen it before, and he wants to snap at her, tell her that agonising over the shredded life used to make it fly is wasting _time_ , that there’s nothing they can do to change it now. “We’ll cripple the ship, send in a boarding party, and get your friends out.”

“I can’t ask that of you.” Jon strides upwards, hardly notices the drop on either side of him, vanishing away into fog. It feels normal now, to take the risk of falling, but Melanie lingers on the dock, only hurries after him once he’s almost at the top. “It’s attacking a Stranger ship in their home port – it’s too dangerous.”

“Yes, you can,” Melanie informs him, sharply dismissive. “I asked it of you. For my mutiny. That worked out, here we are, and I owe you.”

“But your crew doesn’t,” Jon points out. Behind them, Fiona starts to cast off from the dock, and he feels like the rope she’s unwinding might as well have been around his chest. “Did you tell the new hands what they’d be signing on for?”

“Yes, actually.” Melanie folds her arms, finally seems to concede to being distracted. “And this is my crew now. My ship. They’ll go where I want, do what I want them to do, and if at any point they think I’m not leading them properly, they’re welcome to mutiny themselves. I’m repaying a debt to a friend, and the rest of them seem content to join me in it. Stop trying to talk me out of going to get your friends back. You can stay here if you want.”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” Jon says. “I do – I just don’t think we have enough information to just launch an attack like that. What if there’s more than one ship in the port? If I could just find out a little more–”

“ _No_ ,” Melanie cuts him off, hard and uncompromising, the sympathy evaporating away from her. “No, absolutely not. No more magic, Jon – stop trying to rationalise why it might help, why you need to do it. I know you’ve been using it to check on your friends, make sure they’re still alive, but anything more than that – I don’t want to be explaining to them why you’re not you anymore.”

“Right,” Jon sighs, tries to exhale the rest of the argument he wants to make, because she’s not going to hear it. “Fine. Just… let me know if you can think of anything I _can_ do to help.” He risks a wry, pained smile. “Maybe I can polish the cannons or something.”

“Maybe.” Melanie steps towards the steering column, effectively ending the discussion, and shoots her last words over her shoulder. “For now, go back to your cabin and get some rest. You look terrible. I’ll get us on course.”

Jon nods, stays long enough to watch her take her place, with a faint flicker of pride. Then he heads below decks. Finds himself walking away from his own lodgings, back towards Elias’ cabin. He moves as quickly as he can, even though most of the crew probably has no reason to expect anything odd of it, and pushes the door quietly closed behind him.

The room is still as he’d last seen it – ransacked, though the small effort that he and Melanie had made to bring enough order to it to search is still intact, a few small stacks of papers piled on the floor. He ignores them, going straight to the still-untouched desk, and pulling Melanie’s old knife from his pocket.

His work on the drawer is crude, unskilled – if there had been any traps, he’s sure they would have gone off, caught him in a flurry of flame and set about catching the ship’s boards, but there’s nothing. It confirms Jon’s assumption – he’d noticed the regularity that Elias used them with, presumed that that along with the warding that is the general superstition around magic meant that he’d leave them with only mundane locks.

It’s also possible, though he tries not to think it too hard, that Elias had left them unprotected on purpose, for exactly this eventuality.

He doesn’t care. Lifts out three ornate boxes, each of which contains stones that are a little more ornate than the ones that Jon had been training with. The most appealing is carved from a swirling, green and black rock, the surface polished to a high lustre – it’s cold enough that he shivers when he touches it, slides it into one pocket.

The others, he returns to the drawer, tells himself he can come back if it doesn’t work, on the off-chance that Melanie doesn’t take the time to burn it all. Then he leaves, hurrying back to his own room, expecting at any moment to hear the snap of Melanie’s voice behind him.

When he gets there, he locks the door behind him, sits on the bed and waits for the thundering of his heart in his chest to slow.

Melanie doesn’t understand. By her own admission, she’d come aboard to escape something, not to find someone, would have no idea how it feels, to struggle through that laboured connection in search of proof of life, only to be struck so hard by fear that he can barely stand. From Tim’s side, a bubbling guilt and horror that refuses to subside, a dullness from Martin’s that scares him. Things could worsen for them at any moment, and he wouldn’t know, because he can hardly find them anymore.

With the stone in his hand, they come as easy as breathing. They’re holding each other, again, familiar weights against each other. The terror is almost a third presence, trying to force itself into the spaces between them, and he has to force himself to relax again, let it wash over him. He breathes, slowly, trying to exist only as the dust motes around him do. 

“All right,” he says, softly, as the threads of Tim and Martin wind themselves together in his mind, near-inseparable. “All right. I’ll be there soon. Just a little longer. I’m coming.”


	16. Chapter 16

Tim doesn’t know why he wakes up. There’s no noise to startle him, no movement, no touch at his arm. But he starts back to consciousness anyway, and knows there’s something wrong even before he opens his eyes.

At first, he sees nothing, senses nothing, and maybe that’s it – there’s a stillness, a silence, where there should be noise and presence, and when he reaches for the soft, slow breathing from Martin beside him, he finds only empty bed.

As he props himself up, he notices a shape, at the far side of the pool of weak golden glow that spills from their lantern, and lets himself breathe easier. Martin. Probably just going to get some water, from the pitcher and table that Danny had brought them, and the cold where he should be had disturbed Tim. He’ll come back, any moment, and they can settle into one another again.

Except, he doesn’t. Doesn’t move at all, even closer to the water. Just stands where he is, a little too upright. Tim watches, frowning, and more pieces of it start to stick out in his head – there’s a strange angle to him, no shift to his shoulders, his arms are held out in front of him even though he’s not near enough to reach for a drink yet.

Tim sits up, and the change in angle shows him everything, understanding hitting so hard that he’s frozen for an instant, rooted to the spot. He’s cold, far too cold, his blood a glacier flow that can bring nothing but winter to the rest of him.

Martin had never made it as far as the table – if he had, Tim’s sure that there’d be shards of broken cup around his feet, water seeping into the boards. Danny is standing directly in front of him, fingers wrapped so tightly around his throat that the skin warps under his grip. He holds him firm, the other hand resting against his face in a parody of affection, and kisses him. It’s a firm, violent thing, his lips crushing at Martin’s, moving against them in an effort to take it ever deeper. Martin’s eyes are wild, his nails clawing along Danny’s arm in an effort to tear himself free, but all he’s managed to do is rip the surface layer of skin, revealing something underneath that is very clearly not flesh.

As Tim stares, Danny steps in closer, his body pressing at Martin’s. His eyelids slide down, almost in contentedness, and a low, hungry sound rises in the back of his throat. Martin stumbles backwards, a doomed effort to recoil, and Danny goes with him, pushing him towards the bed.

Tim moves. He bolts to his feet, strikes Danny so hard that he’s sure he must have travelled further than just the scant distance between them, to have built up enough momentum to knock the breath from both of them. His shoulder drives into Danny’s midsection, knocking him back, away. He releases Martin, though Tim’s half-sure it’s more surprise than anything else.

Behind him, Martin drops to the ground, no longer pinned upright, wheezing.

Tim plants his feet and keeps his place, between him and Danny, for all that he wants to keep going, rain violence down on the thing that wears his brother’s skin, his knuckles itching to bleed against its face.

“What the fuck was that?” he snarls, leaving the pretence of playing along far behind, his voice so raw with fury that he’s not sure any of the words are actually audible.

Danny holds up his hands, the picture of innocent surrender, but his tongue snakes out, flickering along his lips like he’s trying to find the taste of Martin on them.

“I’m sorry,” he says, too slow, and it comes out rough with want. “What did I do wrong?”

“You don’t _touch him_ ,” Tim hisses. It’s too much, and he has to take a couple of breaths, forcing air in and out, until the heat in his chest goes down far enough for him to speak again. “Have you got that? You don’t lay a hand on him ever again, or I will tear you apart.”

Danny blinks, wide-eyed and earnest, a study in innocent confusion, like Tim hadn’t just caught him with his tongue down Martin’s throat.

“I thought we were family,” he says. “I thought we were going to share things again. Like we used to.”

“Well you thought _wrong_!” The words ache, all through Tim’s teeth, with the need for them to be more, to be punctuated with fists and boots and all the force he can muster. “Not him. Never him. Understand?”

Danny’s gaze flickers past him, to Martin, still struggling to regain his breath, just a broken rushing of air.

“Don’t _look_ at him,” Tim snaps, risks a step closer, looming over as best he can. “Just get out.”

Danny does as he’s told. Stands, slowly, as if he’s trying not to spark Tim’s ire any further, and then backs out, keeping his face towards Tim at all times, even when he has to scrabble three times against the door for the handle.

Tim doesn’t waver until he’s heard the key turn in the lock, and then he whirls around, crouches beside Martin. He’s breathing, but his hands are curled around his neck like he’s still trying to pull away Danny’s grip, and there’s nothing smooth or regular about it, each lungful of air dragged in like it’s his last.

He reaches for him, but Martin flinches back. Falters, but Martin shakes his head, flounders towards him. Tim helps him up, takes his weight until they make it back to the bed, then settles him there, sits beside him, still holding him.

“It’s all right now,” he says, tries to convince himself that it doesn’t sound hollow. “I’ve got you.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin gasps, around the violent heave of his chest. He’s still staring towards the door, as though he’s expecting Danny to come back through at any moment.

“No, no, it’s not your fault.” Tim makes an effort to gentle his voice, and wraps Martin into a hug, moves him carefully around to face him instead. “It’s all right now. He’s gone.” That feels like a lie – Danny will be back, he knows, obsessing and dangerous, and all Tim can hope is that this is a lesson that he’s at least going to internalise.

They’ll have to change their behaviour. Once the worst of it has passed, he’ll need to ask Martin not to go far without waking him first, make sure himself that he sleeps between Martin and the door, is never asleep when Martin isn’t. Hope that Danny will still stop when Tim tells him to.

He just can’t force the scene from his head. Doesn’t think he ever will, can still see it as clearly as if it were still happening. The expression on Danny’s face, that he desperately needs to know isn’t too similar to one that Martin will know on his own. Martin’s terror, stark and helpless, far too vulnerable in Danny’s hold. The places it could have gone, if he had just slept a little longer, when Danny might have decided to wake him.

Martin lets out a soft sob, immediately tries to choke it back in, and Tim starts to rock him, gently, back and forth, strokes at his hair, in an inadequate attempt at comfort. Murmurs out more useless, wordless promises, without even knowing if Martin hears them.

Inside his head, he decides, almost unconsciously, that Danny isn’t going to need to touch Martin again for Tim to kill him. He’s already done enough.

* * *

Jon reaches out. Drifts around the weight of the green stone in his hand, the only anchor he has. Tries to set himself in a memory, as he’d done when learning with Elias, and let it guide him into the others’ minds.

It’s not much, that he picks. Just a soft evening, at the museum, where the four of them had been working together, each of them at their own desk. Jon had looked up, and he’d seen Tim, compiling a report about some ruins that he’d heard about, and he’d seen Martin, finishing a sketch of some bird that he’d been given to nurse by one of the locals. It had felt like he’d breathed air for the first time that day, his chest overflowing with it. He’d known them, and for that instant it had been everything.

He holds the memory, plucks the threads of it like a tune, to shake loose further understanding, and it falls through to him in sharp, irregular pieces like those of a broken mirror.

There’s a flash of him, getting back to the museum, finding them gone, despair in a handful of ash and absence. Then the little grey creature that he’d bought for Martin, sitting in its birdcage next to Sasha’s bed as she grows stronger, chirps to it, with no one else to talk to, names it Wolfgang. There’s a man, with cold, remote eyes, the sky behind him as he falls, a wolf snapping furious jaws at his heels, the two of them wind-buffeted through their patterns of violence – the same two stand on unfamiliar soil, with a hum of trees and life around them so far below the sky that it almost looks small. 

It’s too much. It feels as if his head is starting to spill, and he can feel, distantly, that his nose is bleeding again, droplets following the curve of his lips and then his jaw, down and pooling in the hollow of his throat.

He keeps going, pushes on. Sees Basira, strapping on her boots and going to search for Daisy’s remains because she has nothing else. Harriet Fairchild, reorganising a shelf of books, hurling some with a disdainful thud onto the floor. A corpse that had once belonged to someone called Sarah Baldwin, now nothing more than a squabble for crows.

Tim and Martin, at least. They’re alone, in the dark, and he sees each of them through the other’s eyes – Martin is trembling, Tim struggling to soothe him but they both keep one eye on the door the whole time, certain and terrified that their captor might return at any time. Neither of them bleeds, but both are sure that it’ll only be a matter of time. They’re cold and hungry and aching for a glimpse of the sky. 

The room they are in is of no use to him. It’s dark, hidden away, and there is nothing there for them but each other. He casts along Martin’s past, searching for something else, and he sees a brief glimpse of a cage, filled with a wailing knot of people, gaunt and with skin hanging. Knows that that isn’t for them – Martin had been walked past it. They’re for something other than parts.

He tries for Tim, and instead of the ship, he finds himself at an unfamiliar port, standing and looking out at the vast expanse of nothing before him. It seems to seep into his chest, settle around his bones and make him alone. Before that, two boys with the same smile, playing in an orchard. They fight over who could climb highest in the apple trees, shaking blossom down like snow. The memory hurts Jon for a reason that he doesn’t have. Not useful either.

In his room on board Melanie’s ship, he knows that there’s more blood, now, but he still does not have anything that he can take to her.

He reaches for Tim again. Almost recoils from a moment of bliss with Martin, a warmth and groaning pleasure that that he should never have known, forges on past it. There’s darkness, then, a cramped space and that coiled anger, familiar from the line he’s drawn between them before.

At least, the deck of the Stranger ship. Tim moves around it, struggling to keep out of sight of the monsters that pace it, things that could crawl up the sails without ladders, their limbs bending in far too many places. Something falls from his pocket as he sets the charges, whirring with clockworks and small magics that do not look to Jon like anything that already exists in their world.

He feels the weight of a pistol in Tim’s hand, rehearses with him the instructions he’d been given in its use by Eric Delano’s lost son. Before him, the corridors of the ship, twining with each other like a tangle of ivy. He sees the path Tim takes through them, the door that takes him to Martin. Beyond, the room where they still are, pinned like collector’s butterflies.

Jon knows the way now. He exhales, slowly, tries to come back to himself, but he can’t seem to open his eyes. He’s stuck, trying to tread water across an ocean with no raft to keep him up. Knows he will fall, will drown, because he had gone too far and found beyond more than he should have.

Precarious control slipping from his fingers, he sees Martin’s mother, shouting, her face twisted. He knows that Martin had been hiding from her, unable to stand the way that she looked at him. He sees Tim, first arriving at the museum, then on a faraway ship with that cold-eyed man, watching as Martin befriends a scratchy, malevolent cat. Sasha takes her first steps, towards a bright speck of ladybird that had caught her scant toddler’s attention.

It’s more than he means to reach for, more than he is supposed to know. There is, somewhere that he no longer is, a hammering at a door. He hears splintering, voices, but he cannot open his eyes to see who they belong to.

Melanie, though, he recognises. He knows that she moves close to the edge of the bed, tries to shake him awake, and that her hands come away bloody. The way it dries shakes her own memories loose, gunfire and screaming and a war that follows after her, waits for landfall. She wipes her fingers on her jacket, and keeps trying to rouse him, though she knows she can’t, and he steals the fact of it from her head.

“Jon,” she says, and he can hear in her voice that the captaincy was something that she had dreamed of since she was a little girl, ever ambitious and ever longing for the things that people told her she couldn’t have. “What the fuck have you done to yourself?”

* * *

Tim doesn’t touch him, anymore. Not in the way that Martin had grown used to, during their time with Mike – Tim had always liked to reach for him, found it a lot easier than Martin had. He’d seek comfort in those casual little brushes of skin, reassurance that each of them was still there. It takes him a while to notice – he can tell that something’s wrong, missing, but it’s difficult to pinpoint it, especially as they still sleep so close to each other. Can’t really avoid touching on that bed that narrow – but then once, twice, he tries to reach for Tim’s hand, and Tim pulls away.

Martin isn’t even sure that he notices he’s doing it. Each time, he seems to be concentrating very hard on something else, for all that Martin would have thought that there was nothing else there for him to concentrate on.

But then he reaches again, and again Tim pulls his hand out of Martin’s range, almost as if he does it on reflex.

“Tim?” Martin asks. He hates how it sounds, plaintive and shaken. Bruised. Not much of a challenge. But he’s still shaken, after what had happened with Danny. Dreams it, constantly. The monster, stepping out of the deeper shadows around the door like a wraith, the odd hardness of his mouth, the taste of varnish and leather. Awareness hazing at the edges as the hand around his throat tightens, but refusing to fade out completely. In the worst of the nightmares, Tim doesn’t rouse until it’s all over, or Danny knocks him back like a fly. He wakes crying out, with Tim desperately trying to comfort him, keep him quiet, half his attention always on the door.

“Martin?” Tim says, vague, as if he’s not even noticed it. But when Martin taps at the back of his hand, drawing attention to it, he lets out a long sigh, and shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

“You... you are allowed, you know,” Martin says. Feels like he’s groping about in the dark with the sentence, the assumption. His throat hurts as he tries to speak, but he pushes on through it, and wishes it came out like that. “I know you’re not him. You don’t even look that similar.”

“We used to.” Tim’s eyes are faraway, his stare pressing through the wall as if he can see the sky beyond it. He angles his face away from Martin’s, when he tries to shuffle closer.

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, so automatic that he doesn’t even know what he’s apologising for. Doesn’t even know if he needs to. “Is that it? You don’t want to touch me because he did?”

“Not how you’re suggesting,” Tim says. He shuffles to maintain the inch of space between them, but at least makes an effort to look him in the eye at last. “It’s not that I don’t want to touch you. The fact that he… did _that_ to you, it doesn’t change how I feel about you. I’m just scared.”

“What do _you_ have to be scared of?” Martin demands, and he hates the emphasis that slips out of his mouth before he can control it. It’s not Tim’ fault that Danny has no intention of hurting him, or that Danny’s chased them halfway across the world to try and restore some monstrous vision of their family.

“He just… seems to fixate on it, when I touch you.” Tim hesitates, tests at his teeth with his tongue. “I don’t want him to start anything like that again.”

“You told him not to,” Martin reminds him – hadn’t sounded anything like himself, enough that the memory brings a shiver to his spine.

“Yeah. I don’t know if he’ll listen. He was my little brother. Little brothers never listen.” Tim stares down at his hands, wrings at them. “I don’t want him to take me touching you as some kind of... excuse. He seemed to think that because I’m doing it, it’s okay for him to do it as well.”

“Then you’ll tell him again,” Martin says. Feels petulant, rushes into an overcorrection. “I mean, if you’re not comfortable, then of course we won’t, I just don’t want you to assume that– or not do something you want to because– I understand. I don’t want it to happen either, but it’s done now. He knows that we’re... he knows you love me. He knows I love you, and it’s not going to change what he thinks that he can get away with just because we’re not holding hands.”

Tim exhales. Keeps his hands in his lap, forces them still.

“I don’t want him to see us kissing again,” he says. “It’s – it’s too much. I can’t take the risk that I’m not going to be there to stop him, or that he won’t listen to me when I do – you know he’s stronger than me, right? He’s stronger than both of us. And even if it just _feels_ like it’s mitigating the risk, I want to do it.”

“Not kissing, then,” Martin concludes, nods to show that he accepts it, even if he doesn’t like it. “But Tim – we already sleep together.”

“Not–”

“Not like that,” Martin corrects. “Not here. Fuck no. But physically. There’s not space to do anything else.” And Tim keeps hold of him, in the night, when his mind isn’t awake to keep him from doing it, or when the nightmares come to call for either of them. It feels safe, is an illusion that Martin values. 

Tim twists his fingers around a little further, and Martin wants to get hold of them, stop him, before he snaps them.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s _rational_ ,” he says. “I’m not going to stop being afraid. And neither are you, so can we just... leave it, for now?”

“Sure,” Martin says, and he tries to keep the hitch out of his voice. Not Tim’s fault. Besides, these are hardly the right circumstances to be pursuing a relationship in. Swallows some nonsense about how he’d at least never been broken up with like this before. “I just... I don’t want to say I miss you. You’re right here.”

“No.” Tim finally looks up again, offers a rough effort at a smile. “No, I get it. I miss you too. There’s so much I miss. Jon and Sasha and the museum and all those little animals of yours. My heart can take a little more.” He coughs, clears his throat. “And once we get out of here I’m going to more than make up for it.”

Martin hums. Understands that the edge of flirtation in Tim’s voice is supposed to lighten the mood, make things easier for both of them. It doesn’t. Doesn’t change the need to reassure him, even if it’s a lie, to pull him close and kiss him until they can’t remember their own names anymore.

“I’m just doing what I can, Martin,” Tim says, softly. “I know it’s not enough, but… it’s all I have.”


	17. Chapter 17

Tim leaves Martin behind, when Danny asks him if he wants to go up on deck. He doesn’t want to –hates the idea of having Martin out of his sight, even for a moment, but he knows that insisting would have done one of two things. Either they would all have ended up out on deck, with him giving himself a headache trying to maintain the spatial awareness to stay between them at all times, or they would all have stayed in the cabin, and Danny would have had yet another reason to hate Martin.

So he just tucks the blankets over Martin a little more securely, so that if he does wake up while they’re gone, he’ll at least know that Tim hadn’t been taken violently. He would write a note, but there’s no paper, and he’s afraid to find out what he would get if he asked Danny for some.

It still doesn’t feel like the right thing to do – as Danny leads him through the ship, he wonders if he should have woken him instead, explained properly. Hadn’t at the time, because he’d known that he would have been able to feel Danny’s eyes on them the whole time, weighing up the interaction, storing every part of it in such detail that he’d be able to write essays on the patterns of their breathing. And Martin at least hadn’t looked like he was having a nightmare, not that it’s necessarily easy to tell; there are dreams where they can’t move. Tim has those ones, a lot, where he watches as something that is not his brother moves over Martin, touches him like he owns him, kisses his tears from his face, and can do nothing. Wakes still keeping his own useless silence. He knows Martin has ones like that, too, even without asking him. 

He hadn’t been thinking clearly. Just doing what he could to keep Danny happy – he’s taken to picking at things, to blaming Martin for it every time that Tim declines or postpones something that he suggests. It’s only little comments, a downturned face, but Tim can feel them adding up into a larger picture, one where it’s clear as day that he believes Martin is the only thing standing between him and Tim, the one obstacle between him and the _proper family_ that he prioritises over everything else and that Tim can hardly bear to think anymore.

The deck should feel open and clear, a scant handful of the sensations that he remembers from Mike’s ship. He should be able to lean on the rail, breathe, close his eyes and pretend that he’s still there, that Danny had never found him.

Instead, the grim-stitched sails hang low enough that it’s somehow even more claustrophobic than their cell, and the air is thick with the heavy scent of tanning leather. Beyond them, the Faceless Port stands still and silent, the supply ships that should have been their escape route trundling slowly off into the distance.

Danny leads him past one of the unnatural deckhands, and Tim doesn’t have it in him to refuse. Just trails after him, trying not to be sick, even as his stomach turns. Danny pauses, inhales like they’re wreathed in the freshest mountain breeze, and stops them both around the base of the mainmast.

“I want to show you,” he says, with one of his best smiles. Tim can almost recognise in it the child that he’d known, draw how the planes of his face had grown, but he keeps getting lost, somewhere before the final stage. “Help you understand. I know you’ve been finding it all frightening.”

“Show me what?” Tim asks, trying to fight the frown off his face.

Danny digs a hand into his pocket, and pulls out what Tim at first takes to be a small, off-coloured handkerchief. Then he shakes it out, and Tim recognises it – a layer of skin, thin as the ones that flake off after sunburn, sticking to itself where it’s been folded. He can’t keep himself from recoiling, locking his jaw closed to try and force the nausea back down.

Danny narrows his eyes at his response, and Tim’s skin crawls with the abrupt need to change that, make him smile again, before it gets added to the tally of Martin’s perceived sins, as if any rational person wouldn’t find it horrifying.

It’s his fault, he’s sure. Danny refuses to blame him for anything, accept that he might not want to be a part of Danny’s family anymore, so every flicker of displeasure that he shows is laid at Martin’s door, that vague interest in meeting Tim’s friends and sharing in his things swerving hard over into a sour, creeping jealousy that had only been fed by the way that he’d interfered to stop the kiss.

“Whose is that?” he demands, before Danny can even get a word out.

Danny tilts his head to the side, in that eerie gesture of curiosity and confusion. He didn’t used to, when they were young. Used to just ask things, running questions all over where tact should be without a care in the world.

“Does it matter?” he asks. “It’s not yours.”

“Is it a person’s?” Tim tries, and it’s an effort to keep it neutral, not let the disgust sticking in his craw seep into his voice.

“Not anymore.”

Tim watches, numbly, as Danny grabs his wrist, lifting it up and draping the stretch of skin over it. It barely has any weight to it at all, until Danny starts to bend it around his fingers like he’s trying to fit it like a glove. He jerks his hand away, violently, coughing. The skin falls straight down to the deck – shouldn’t, Tim knows, should be caught in the breeze and blown away, but it seems like the wind can’t quite touch it.

“What did you do that for?” Danny bends down to pick it up, takes a moment to brush what Tim can only assume to be imaginary dirt off it. It should be fragile, should tear, stretching holes through itself, but it doesn’t do that, either.

“What are you doing with it?” Tim counters, with a full step away.

“I’m showing you,” Danny says, with a confused blink. “Like I said.”

“No, I need to know exactly what you’re trying to do,” Tim insists, trying to maintain the distance as Danny steps towards him with it again.

“Magic,” Danny tells him, like it’s obvious, for a second every inch the little brother.

“ _How_?” Tim demands. “Look – I, I don’t know a lot about that kind of thing. But the Vast, it makes people dizzy, it makes spaces larger, it brings storms – what does your magic actually _do_? How are you making it happen?”

Danny hesitates, considers him oddly, but at least comes no closer.

“It doesn’t really do anything yet,” he says. “I just want to show you what happened to me.”

“I don’t...” Tim pauses, and then gestures at one of the creatures as it passes, loping towards the steering column. “Is it going to make me one of them?”

“No,” Danny says, with a faint laugh. “Not at all. We need different equipment to make them. I want to make you like me. Family.”

“We already are family,” Tim says, and the word aches in his throat, doesn’t belong to this nightmare of Danny anymore. “You – you don’t need to change me. You know that.”

“You don’t understand,” Danny tells him. “And I can’t make you, that’s not how I or any of this works. But you’ll see, when you get there.” His expression darkens, clouding over. “I suppose we can try your Martin first, if that would make you feel better.”

“Absolutely not,” Tim says, and he offers his hand, lets Danny take it. Danny smiles, radiantly, then places the other skin back down over his, and starts to pinch it into place.

Tim’s legs go out from under him, and he feels himself fall to the deck as if from a thousand miles away.

* * *

It is as if the whole world snaps. Jon startles, flinches back to himself, scrambling upright from a half-dream that had had him crawling through the heart of the ship with the woodworm, above the stretched tendons of that Vast engine – an impossible shimmering beyond the creature’s comprehension, and Jon’s too.

“What?” he demands. Scrubs a hand over his face, frowns when comes away covered in flaking, dried-black blood, but can’t bring himself to be revolted. “What happened?”

“You _idiot_.” The voice is Melanie’s, and he can see a blur with her shape, standing over him, sharp-eyed and angry. “You made a mess, and I had to fix it.”

Jon glances around, takes a minute to recognise the now-familiar walls of his tiny cabin. Not home, not yet. He tries to cast his mind back, remembers reaching out for the others, and then the kind of everything that might as well just be nothing.

“How long has it been?” he asks.

“Two days since we left the Mountain,” Melanie says. “We’re almost to the Faceless Port. I thought I had better wake you.”

“How did you do that?” Jon pauses, lets it stretch, but Melanie doesn’t respond. “I felt you trying to get to me, I just couldn’t...”

Melanie holds up a single strip of black cloth in one hand, and Jon blinks at it, for a moment utterly unable to see anything about it. Then his focus resolves, and he can recognise it – a blindfold, stitched with repeating pattern of a stylised closed eye.

“Elias had this in the bottom of his desk,” she says.

“Isn’t that...” Jon gestures, sure that he’d seen a familiar thing ripped away on the breeze. The thing that had earned Eric Delano his keelhauling.

“It’s not the same one, if that’s what you’re talking about,” Melanie says. “I think he must just keep one around, in case something goes wrong with one of his experiments.”

“You went through his desk?”

“Not thoroughly.” Melanie glares, skewers him with it. “But yes I took the stone you found, and all of them went overboard. I’ll be having the whole thing burned, once we can stop in port for long enough. You don’t need this, Jon. It’s just going to hurt you, and we don’t have time to put you back together. Like I said, we’re almost there. But you have an appointment to keep.”

“An appointment?” Jon tries to push himself to his feet, only for Melanie to shove a damp cloth into his hands, use it to push him back into a sitting position. He rubs it obediently over his face, and the water washes over him, cool but not cold, and sluicing away the worst of the blood. It’s good, refreshing, and he tells himself that it’s worth not looking like an illustration from a horror novel when he finds the others.

“With Elias,” Melanie clarifies, tightly.

“I thought you didn’t want me talking to him?” Jon blinks.

“I don’t,” Melanie says. “But you really didn’t give me very much choice. I had to ask him how to wake you. That was his condition.”

“Fine.” Jon indulges in another couple of wipes, and then dumps the cloth back into the bowl of water that Melanie had soaked it in. Knows that he’s missed a few bits, but doesn’t care. He’ll get the rest later. “I suppose I’d better get going. Don’t want to keep him waiting. I, er – I did manage to get something useful. I’ll recognise the ship they’re on when I see it.”

Melanie doesn’t reply. Just ushers him up and out, hangs behind him like a silent shadow all the way to the brig, though he can’t tell whether it comes from a lack of trust or a belief that he might keel over at any moment. Both, perhaps.

The door unlocks on a broad smile that Elias has presumably been wearing since the moment that he’d found out what Jon had done. It only widens when Jon removes the gag, his tongue pushing out to moisten his lips. The sight of it disgusts Jon for reasons that he can’t remember, but he quashes the bile rising in his throat, and goes to take his stool in silence.

“I have to say, Jon,” Elias says. “I’m proud of you. Perhaps I should have introduced you to Simon Fairchild the second you came aboard.”

“I did what I had to,” Jon replies, curtly. “You wanted to talk to me. Talk.”

“All business?” Elias affects disappointment that can’t quite touch the glee in his eyes. “Not very friendly.”

Jon holds his tongue – it occurs to him that he doesn’t need to be here. That Elias has already fulfilled his side of the bargain with Melanie; if he wanted, he could just get up and walk out and nothing would be lost.

“Anyway,” Elias says, quickly, as if he’d noticed. “I understand that you and the others are off to the Faceless Port to take on Nikola Orsinov. That’s quite the undertaking.”

“It’s where Tim and Martin are,” Jon says. Clamps his mouth shut around the fact that he doesn’t need to justify himself to Elias anymore.

“Quite,” Elias says. “Quite. I’m sure it will be a lovely reunion. To make sure it goes as smoothly as possible, I have a little advice. I don’t believe that you and Miss King are quite equipped to face The Stranger’s flagship – they might not be the strongest magic in the world, but they are still monsters, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Jon grinds out.

“No, of course not.” Elias nods, as if it’s all entirely natural. “Your friends above everything else. But please understand that Captain Orsinov will kill you.”

“She’ll try.” Jon glowers. “If all you’re trying to do is scare me–” 

“She will do more than try,” Elias interrupts. “She will reach into your head, and make you forget how to use your legs. She will skin you, and as she does you will forget that you ever had a skin to start with. You will die of hypothermia or infection utterly unable to recall your own name, or the names of the people you love.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“You go in alone,” Elias says. “You have a gift for the Eye – use it. It will allow you to see through her deceptions. That is the only way that you will be able to beat her.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.” Jon climbs to his feet, makes sure that his contempt is visible in every motion of it. “I assume that was all?”

“It was,” Elias says. “Though – good luck, be careful. I would hate for you to end up killing yourself before I’ve finished with you. You had such promise, and I hardly think that those friends of yours are quite worth it.”

“You don’t know everything, then,” Jon says. He turns his back, walks out of the room, offers Melanie a grim nod on his way past, to tell her that he hadn’t listened, hadn’t been swayed. She returns it, and he hears her sliding the lock into place behind him.

It doesn’t help. He can still feel Elias’ smile on his back, all the way down the corridor.

* * *

“Hey.”

At the sound of Tim’s voice, Martin takes a long moment to paste a careful smile onto his face, one that shows as little of the haunted, haggard days that they’ve been suffering through as possible. He turns to greet him with it, and can see the second he does that he’s not fooled by any of it. 

“Hey,” Martin says, hopes Tim notices that his voice is at least coming through a little stronger. “How are you feeling?”

“Still terrible.” Tim tries to push himself up into a sitting position, but while at least one of his arms holds, this time, the other still gives out, sending him back down hard. He sighs, squints up at Martin. “What about you?”

“I am not the one who had to be carried back by a monster,” Martin points out, more sharply than he should. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah.” Tim waves a hand, trying to brush past it all. “Yeah. But while I’ve been sleeping – he’s not been here?”

“No.” He asks that every time he wakes up, ever since one of the tall grey things had brought him back in, laid him out on the bed like he was nothing more than a bundle of cloth. Danny had been there then, had taken hold of Martin’s throat, more to make a point than to throttle him, this time, and calmly ordered him to look after his brother. “He doesn’t seem interested if you’re not… around.”

Tim had been mostly sleeping, since then. Wakes often, can’t seem to settle into a proper rest, but he doesn’t seem to have the strength to do anything but lie there.

“Any symptoms?” Martin asks. He sits, carefully, on the side of the bed, and Tim lays a hand on his thigh, idly traces circles against the material of his trousers. Maybe, Martin thinks, he doesn’t remember the conversation they’d had before, can’t keep the memories straight in his head.

“Head still hurts,” he says. “And... I itch. Skin stuff. You know. I want to try walking again.”

“Tim...” Martin lays a hand on top of his, trying to muster a new way to let him down gently, but Tim gives a violent shake of his head.

“What are a few more falls?” he demands. “Look, I know you’ve been trying to... Vast the lock open. If it works, you’re not going to just pretend it’s all still working. I have to be ready to move, if you manage it.”

“Tim… we’re out of port,” Martin tells him, as softly as he can. “The ship left this morning. We’ve not got anywhere to go. I’m not trying anymore.”

“We could _hide_ ,” Tim insists, but the strength in it is sapped by a long, aching sigh. “This ship’s full of spaces, I saw them on my way down. I can’t stay here, Martin – Danny’s trying to make me into something else. I can’t let him. I won’t be that.”

“He’s hardly going to try again yet,” Martin says. “You’re sick, he knows you’re sick. That’s why he’s not been here. I won’t let him.”

“You’re in no position to stop him, Martin,” Tim points out. “Neither am I. And besides, we have to give him something, or–”

“It’s not going to be you,” Martin snaps, bringing up his stubbornness like a shield. “I don’t care if he thinks it’s all my fault. He won’t kill me as long as he thinks you’ll never forgive him, and–”

“He’s trying to persuade himself I would,” Tim tells him, with a grimace. “Like I can’t think for myself, or something. I’ll keep telling him, but… I don’t think I can keep him off you forever.”

“You don’t need to,” Martin says, forces brightness and hope into it. “I’ll keep practicing with the threads – next time we reach port, maybe I’ll be able to get us out, but in the meantime, I need you to hold on.”

“He wasn’t always like this, you know.” Tim coughs, once, and Martin tries not to study his lips too closely, to see if he’s bringing blood up again. “I mean... he was always a _bit_ like this. But that was just the way younger brothers are, you know? He was headstrong and thought he knew best all the time. He could be a brat. But he never hurt anyone. Wasn’t a monster. Fell in love with things at the drop of a hat – things, not people, hobbies and interests. He was bright and I loved him and when he left it broke us into pieces.”

“You never really talked about him,” Martin says, quietly, trying to make it clear that he’s not asking for him to now. “Before.”

“No,” Tim agrees. “No – there wasn’t really anything for me to say. We were kids, and then he was gone. There was a raid on the village. No one saw who it was. Our parents blamed me, said I should’ve been looking after him, but I’d been saving for months to go out on a trip to the nearest town with this girl I liked, and I wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Martin mutters. It’s something that he’d told himself, often enough, when he’d been that age. Never even made a dent, but perhaps it’s easier, coming from someone else.

“That’s not what they thought.” Tim’s voice is smooth, barely a trace of bitterness in it, like he’s had so long to think on it that he can’t really be angry about it anymore. “And eventually they just... went off. I don’t think they meant to not come back. Maybe they did, one day, but I wasn’t there to see it, because I left too. I looked for Danny for years. Never found him, never found word of him. He just vanished. I suppose the Stranger had taken him, saw something in him that meant they didn’t want to keep him in the cages. And then they changed him. Killed him.” He holds a blink too long, then regards Martin through a stare that’s angry to the core of him. “I genuinely thought, when I saw him, that it was him. I wasn’t looking properly. If I’d just thought - we could be away from here. Back in Larkrest, maybe. But I saw my baby brother and I just gave it all up.”

“That’s not your fault either.” Martin can’t put much volume in it. His throat aches, old bruises and second hand pain. 

“Sure feels like it is,” Tim says, but he doesn’t press the point, doesn’t insist and contort himself into knots to keep blaming himself. “But I know what he was. And what he is now... it’s not that. I’m not going to be like that. I refuse to be like that. I am not going to become something that doesn’t love you and Jon anymore, or something that’ll try and make you into one of those things so that we can still be together. No more magic, Martin. Not for me.”

“Because we’ll escape,” Martin says, softly, hearing in the spaces between the words all the things that Tim isn’t saying, feels the need to argue against them anyway. “We’ll find a way, like you said. Maybe we’ll get a chance. Perhaps once you’re feeling better we might be able to overpower him? Long enough to get out.”

Tim snorts, and Martin knows that it’s foolish - he’d felt the strength in Danny’s hands too many times. They won’t beat him in a fair fight. But if it comes to it, he has no intention of letting it be that.

“I’m not going to let you give up,” he says, half-warning.


	18. Chapter 18

Melanie is the first to spot the other ship. It’s a smudge on the horizon, at first, still manages to steal Jon’s breath away from him. She sends Fiona for him the second that she catches sight of it, and by the time that he manages to scramble up to stand beside her, they’re flying directly for it.

She hands him her telescope in silence, points as if he could somehow have missed it, and waits for him to look.

Through the glass, he can make out the broad, circus-tent stripes of the pennant on the mainmast. The clouds of insects, buzzing around it so thickly that it’s almost a shroud of smoke. The pattern of the stitching over the sails, holding together the skins of too many victims, familiar from the time he had stolen with Tim’s memories.

“That’s the one,” he says, and offers her a wide smile that’s all teeth.

She nods, and dispatches Fiona again, to inform the rest of the crew that it’s time. Jon waits at her side, until he’s beckoned over by the two men that she’d assigned to join his particular part of the boarding party, Sebastian and Graham. They’re both seasoned sailors, have been on the ship longer than Jon, though he’s not entirely clear on whether or not they had been a part of the mutiny too.

They strap him into a harness, and go over with him the details of the plan again. He hates it, is sure there are countless places where it could go wrong, but they breeze through it all like it’s no more than docking procedure.

“You’ll never forget your first battle,” Sebastian tells him, as he checks the last of Jon’s buckles, and gives him a hearty pat in the small of his back that sends him staggering.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Jon mutters. He’s seen skirmishes like that from a distance, or in paintings, has read accounts, and everything about them seemed like a violent, confused mess of horror. He’s not ready to live one, but the Stranger ship is near enough now for him to count the gun ports without a telescope, and he knows that their own cannons are armed.

He knows the way, he reminds himself, and finds the route again, each of the turns that he’d seen in Tim’s head. They’ll be waiting for him, at the end of it, and that’ll be worth a few more nightmares.

Melanie waits, and waits – when she finally orders the first shot fired, Jon has almost come to believe that it never will be, that all their guns have somehow failed, or that Melanie has decided it’s not worth engaging after all. Then there’s a crack so deep that he’s almost sure that he imagined it, and one of the monsters that walks across the Stranger deck snaps in half. The upper torso sloughs off, plummets overboard, and the legs waver for a moment, then fold themselves into a new, shorter configuration, and continue about their tasks.

The Stranger ship begins to turn towards them, just as the rest of their guns fire, a thunder that rings hard through Jon’s head. They at least have the element of surprise, if only because attacking a Stranger ship so close to the Faceless Port is its own special kind of madness.

Sebastian moves up, closer to the rail, and shifts his grappling hook against his shoulder, sighting it, waiting for it to come into range.

“You’re sure this is safe?” Jon asks, and Graham gives him a wolfish shrug.

“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “Sebastian here never misses a thing.” He gives a rough laugh, and Jon echoes it, nervously, recognises that it’s some kind of in-joke that he’s not familiar with.

The hook fires out, in concert with a handful of others. There’s a corresponding volley from the Stranger vessel, and the things that start to swarm along the lines between them are like no boarding party that Jon has ever had cause to imagine. Melanie’s pistol cracks, and Jon looks around, trying to see whether she’d hit anything, just as he’s given a hard shove, out into space.

He’s only out on the zipline for the merest of instants, before he strikes the side of the Stranger ship, hard enough to wind him. He hangs there, breathing as if he’d run the whole distance, until an arm reaches down for him, and he’s hauled up to join Graham on the deck.

“Right,” he says. “You know where your friends are?”

“Yes,” Jon pants, pointing towards the centre of the ship, where he knows the hatch down will be. “We have to get below decks, they’re–”

“Sure.” The interruption is Sebastian – he scrambles up next to Jon like the journey was no trouble at all, and gives him a light push, trying to move him in the direction he’s indicating. “Melanie’s going to keep the battle going as long as she can, but if it comes down to us or the ship, I don’t know which one she’ll end up picking, so let’s be as quick as we can, yeah?”

Jon nods.

They skirt around, doing what little they can to keep out of sight – each lurch of a cannonball into the side of the ship is almost enough to throw them from their feet, leaves him grabbing for masts, the others, anything to keep himself steady. He tells himself that they won’t take the ship down, not unless they somehow manage to hit the engine, but it’s still entirely too possible for the three of them to fall.

They come within sprinting distance of the hatch, just in time for another of those elongated monsters to move to stand over it. It reaches out for them, arms spreading and spreading, and then another grappling hook sprouts from its head like a spring flower. It goes down, crashing against the deck, and, unlike the one that had taken the cannon shot, it seems to stay that way. Sebastian tips the gun back over his shoulder, scrabbling to reload it.

“I’ll go first,” Graham shouts, straining to be heard over the noise of the battle. “If it turns out not to be dead, shoot it again.”

“Oddly enough,” Sebastian yells back. “That was my pla–”

He never manages to finish his sentence. There’s a sound, dull and sonorous, like a song that Jon doesn’t quite know, and then the world around him simply stops making sense. Sebastian Skinner’s unfamiliar corpse splays out before him like an unfurling fern – he thinks for a moment that he sees the flash of a whip. Then he remembers that he doesn’t know what a whip is, and it’s hard to keep track of anything else, in a stretch of world fashioned entirely from things that he’s never noticed before.

“Hello there,” says a trickling, theatrical voice, and though Jon doesn’t understand the words, he knows what they mean, he knows that he needs to be afraid. He presses himself into the deck, is vaguely aware of someone who might have been Graham Folger being abruptly lifted into the air, then slung over the side of the ship by one of the creatures.

Perhaps, as Graham falls, there might come a point where he can understand again the shape of the world below him.

“Well, look at _you_ ,” the voice coos, and something arches down to take a closer look at him. He struggles to focus on it, and thinks that he recognises a splay of makeup, where there should be a face. It wouldn’t make sense for there to be a face there, anyway – he can’t think together how one might look, on that smooth sheen of white.

The thing moves towards him, and he can hear the clicking of a thousand false joints, moving under a skin not equipped to sit over them.

“Nikola,” he says, but his vocal chords are ill-suited to being an organ, and the noise that comes out has no resemblance to what he intends.

“Yes!” It sounds pleased, from what he remembers of the emotion, fast-dwindling and with nothing to compare it to in the world around him. “That’s me! I’m glad you’ve been told about me, little seer. You can look all you like, if you want!” The thing spreads out, limbs wide, like one of Martin’s creatures, in display. “I’m afraid you just won’t be able to understand.”

* * *

It sounds like thunder, at first. A storm, Tim thinks, and begins the painstaking process of propping himself up on his elbows, breathes to call Martin over, slowly enough that it won’t set that tight pain through his lungs. Better for them to wait it out together, lying down so they can’t be knocked down.

Martin already seems to have stopped, stands still and listening on the other side of their cell, his hands still mid-fuss over the tea that he’s been trying to put together, in the vague hope that it’ll help with Tim’s symptoms.

The ship pitches, hard to one side, and the pot slips out of Martin’s hands. He flinches back, trying to avoid a spray of scalding hot water, and it impacts hard with the floor. The spout snaps off, skitters away under the bed, the blow too much for the soldering that held it on.

“Did we get hit?” Tim tries to push himself higher, but his skin feels raw where he puts pressure on it, and he wants to just flop back down, find refuge in unconsciousness and hope that when he wakes up, he feels like he fits in his own body again.

“The ships are built to withstand this kind of thing,” Martin tells him, still trying to reassure, even though he must have realised by now that it doesn’t work, that there aren’t words that can ease the nightmares he sleeps and wakes through.

He picks his way around the pool of water on the boards, and packs away the ingredients that he’d had to beg Danny to bring, when he’d broken his self-imposed exile long enough to come and demand to know why Tim hadn’t recovered yet. His movements are slow, measured, though it’s clearly taking him effort – he comes back over to Tim, and crouches, groping under the bed to retrieve the broken spout.

“We’re going to be fine,” he adds, as determinedly optimistic as ever, like there aren’t still bruises all the way around his throat, yellow-toned, now.

There’s another crack from outside, and the ship shudders with it, throwing Martin’s shoulder hard against the edge of the pallet. He yelps, withdraws holding the spout, but the sharp edge has sliced into his fingers, left a thin line of blood against his skin.

“Let me see?” Tim says, reaching. Martin lets him, and Tim studies the injury, not sure exactly what he should be looking for. There’s not too much blood, and it doesn’t seem like a deep wound, so he just prods Martin towards the small pile of cloth-scraps that he’s been using to soothe Tim’s skin. “Wrap something over it. We’ll wash it out when the storm’s passed.”

Martin nods, and sets about doing as he’s told. Probably knew to do it anyway, but Tim appreciates him letting him feel useful. He’s been capable of frustratingly little, since Danny’s attempt to introduce him to Stranger magic, his body rejecting it so utterly that it feels like it’s trying to force him out, too.

“Nasty one,” Martin says, trying to tie the ends of his makeshift bandage one-handed. Tim hisses, snatches at him to do it himself. It takes him longer than it should, the dexterity in his hands not what it had been, but eventually he manages a lopsided bow. “Sounds like we’re going right through the middle of it.”

“Maybe it’ll blow Danny overboard,” Tim suggests, savagely. The moment it’s out of his mouth, he knows it’s a stupid thing to hope for – Danny is the only thing that keeps them from being used up like the Stranger’s other victims. He flushes, waiting for Martin to tell him so, but Martin just nods, braces himself a little more securely against the bed, though he still doesn’t join Tim on it.

He thinks Tim needs space. He’s caught him trying to sleep on the floor, a couple of times, and done his best to put an end to it with each attempt, but he clearly hasn’t been successful. Not if he’s going to have to _ask_ again.

Before Tim can open his mouth to do so, Martin’s pushing himself away, moving carefully towards the door. He’s winding at that thread around his wrist again – practice, or maybe he thinks that if the storm does enough damage, they might need to call in at port for repairs, and get that opportunity he keeps talking about. 

The door bursts inwards before he can reach it, and Martin flinches, scrambling backwards as Danny shoves past him. Tim tenses, but Danny doesn’t seem to have any interest in Martin today – just moves straight towards Tim, a look on his face that it takes Tim far too long to recognise as fear. That twist of features is utterly unfamiliar, nothing like how he’d expressed it, once, when he’d needed Tim to promise him that there were no monsters under his bed.

He hasn’t even bothered to lock the door behind him.

There’s a thud as he drops into a crouch beside the pallet, a creak of joints, and he pulls a long knife from his belt without a word. The blade gleams in the room’s scant light, dazzling into Tim’s eyes, and he scrabbles sideways, trying to drag himself as far from it as he can.

“Martin!” he yelps, and it’s meant to alert him to the open door, the corridor beyond, but Martin doesn’t seem to see it. He just rushes in, makes a grab for Danny’s arm as he tries to bring the knife closer to Tim. Danny shoves him back, but it’s half-hearted, his focus clearly all on Tim; Martin only stumbles back half a pace.

“What are you doing?” Martin demands, making another lunge – his grasping fingers seem to slide away without purchase, Mike’s thread coiling up around his arm.

“The ship is under attack,” Danny says, “We’re boarded. He’s not strong enough. He might get hurt. I’m going to make him stronger. Then he’ll be all right, we’ll be together, and they won’t be able to separate us.”

“No.” Martin tries to yank him back, puts all of his weight into it. “No, I’m not going to let you hurt him anymore – you saw what happened last time, he won’t survive it if you–”

Danny throws an elbow into Martin’s midsection, hard enough to knock him backwards into the wall – his head cracks against it, and when he tries to get up again, he wavers badly, like his balance has gone.

“Danny, don’t,” Tim insists, struggling up onto his own feet. They threaten to give way almost instantly, and he has to grab at the wall for support when the next snap of thunder – cannons, he realises – comes “It’ll kill me, you know I’m not ready–” 

“No.” Danny shakes his head, moves around as if to offer him his support. “You’re like me. It’ll take. You’ll just need to get used to it.”

He makes a grab for Tim’s arm, and Tim barely manages to duck out of the way. Can scarcely keep his eyes on Danny’s face, to guess what way he might go next – the knife holds his attention, and he can feel his mind starting to skip, like a rabbit caught before a fox. There are far too many possibilities glimmering in that length of steel, and he’s sure he can’t account for all of them.

They can’t stop him. He’s too strong for both of them. But at least he’s not paying any attention to the door.

“Martin, go!” Tim snaps, because Martin’s free and clear now. He could get up onto the deck, find whoever is attacking, and maybe make it away with them. Home to Jon, and all he has to do is _leave_.

Martin doesn’t even give him the consideration of a response. He snatches something off the floor, and runs at Danny. Hits with enough momentum up to knock him down, and for a moment the two of them are down, rolling across the floor in a flurry of striking limbs – there’s a noise like wood crunching, and it spurs Tim into motion – he stumbles for the door himself. Maybe he can get to the deck, find help, find a weapon, come back for Martin.

Instead, there’s another snap from behind him. Bone, this time, and Martin lets out a scream that Tim knows he’ll never get out of his head. He hobbles faster, bites his lip to stop himself from looking back.

A hand grabs at his ankle and wrenches his legs out from under him. He hits the deck, his bones jarring with it, one stretched-out finger only just across the threshold. Never even close.

Danny turns him over, rough and impatient, and Tim’s body wails in response, like the floor is made of ground glass, refuses to grant him the strength to try and shove his way free.

“Tim,” Danny says, and his voice is far too soft. The spout of the teapot is sticking absurdly from his chest, the skin around it punctured, flapping free like loose canvas. “I know it hurts, but I’m doing this because I love you.”

* * *

Jon crawls. At least, that is what he wants to do. What he _tries_ to do. He feels, instead, like a moth, the ones pinned in the display at the museum back home. Nikola keeps coming, a looming technicolour nonsense that he cannot fit in his head, and the deck should be solid below him but when he tries to drag himself along it, it slips beneath his hands, and he cannot grasp it.

The whip cracks, over his head, and she laughs, long and fractured. The air between them breaks with it, seems to flutter down around Jon’s body like flower petals. He hates the sensation of it against his skin, but there’s nothing for him to brush away.

Something, elsewhere, roars like a hungry, cheated beast. For a moment Nikola’s attention is no longer on him – there’s a new hole, torn across one of the sails, and Jon squints at it. There’s a bright, achingly blue sky beyond, before the patchwork of stitched skin, and the recognition settles into understanding in his head.

This is what Elias had meant. Nikola will make him forget everything, and the only way that he can protect himself is with sight.

Jon reaches for it. There are no stones here, nothing that he can use to help himself focus, no metaphors that he can find that will let him do as he wants, but he remembers how they felt in his hand. The coolness of the stone, the whorls and knots in the green of the last one he’d used, the depth of the eye engraved on them. It feels more solid than the bloodstained deck that he cannot move across – that he can recognise, now, and his rational mind starts to trickle back to him, like the stutter of raindrops down a window pane.

Then Nikola’s head snaps back down to look at him again, and the whip carves across the deck in front of him, stopping him in his tracks.

“Now,” she says. “We can’t have that, can we?”

He forgets what a stone even is, forgets eyes, forgets everything. He doesn’t know where he is, though there is a hazy but insistent certainty that it was somewhere important, that there was something he needed to do for a someone who is now an unfamiliar hazing shadow in his mind – he sees a face on one of the elongated things around him that he thinks might belong to one of them, but only for a second. Then he can’t recall it anyway.

He’s back to crawling, but Nikola’s attention hangs over him, and he has no idea if he’s going in any direction at all. He supposes that he wasn’t trying for one, would be happy enough at this point to simply go over the side and lose himself to the simple understanding of the fall, but there’s nothing that he can’t lose track of anymore, and he can’t find the way.

“Little seer,” Nikola says. “You will have to tell your master that if he wants to send his toys against me, he needs to at least prepare them a bit longer. Did he even give you any weapons? Oh. No. You won’t be able to tell him, will you? You’re forgetting how to speak. Can you even remember what a tongue is?”

Jon can’t. He keeps trying to get away from her, but that is not borne of him, is no higher learned intention. Just an animal need that is all he has to fall back on. Fleeing, for shelter and safety.

Those things no longer exist. Nikola keeps coming. There are other things, too, but they seem content to let her play with him, defer to her like scavengers to an eagle.

One of his hands slips, knocks against something that doesn’t feel the same as the rest of what is around him. He grasps it, and finds strange hard edges, a whirring little tick that he can feel the rhythm of against his skin. It is the wrong weight. Not of this place. He blinks to try and see it properly, and finds memories.

He glimpses it, for a moment. One point of focus in the mess of colours and lights around, its outline drawn in too many shades, finding its way straight into his absent mind. It’s a box, transparent, with gears on the inside, thread and a switch and a hum of the unnatural. On the edges of it he can feel someone else’s touch, from a long time away.

Tim, he thinks, slowly. Tim had had this. He’s here for Tim, who he loves, who he remembers, leaning on his desk in the evening and telling him that he should really get some rest, that the books would still be there in the morning. Telling him that he was going out, and that he and Martin were welcome to come.

Martin. He’s here for Martin, too, Martin, who he loves, who he remembers, curled up in front of the fire after that brush with the vase, the last of the fragments coughed painfully from his throat, blankets over his shoulders because apparently Tim wasn’t sure how to comfort except through the application of increasing quantities of fabric, all the fear drained out of him and struggling to reach from within his cocoon the cup of tea that Sasha had left him.

Sasha. He’s not here for Sasha, but he knows that he thinks of her, often, that he has written his thoughts to her in spool of trust that he has imagined as a tiny thread over the great expanses of wind and sail between them. He remembers her, teasing him before the others had quite got it into their heads that they could, showing him something interesting that she had found in the course of her studies, and that fire and curiosity that he had recognised too in Melanie.

Melanie. He’s here because of her, because she had taken a chance and given him the opportunity to find again those he loves. He remembers her, sharp as the knives that she carries, remembers how much she is risking for him, and he knows that he cannot let her down, let all of this have been for nothing.

Jon pulls the detonator more firmly into his hand, finds the switch, sitting against his thumb like it’s been waiting for him, and throws it across.


	19. Chapter 19

It takes Martin too long to remember how his limbs work. His arm is at an angle that he doesn’t want to consider, the pain of it trying to force him out of his own skull. He barely manages to push himself up enough to see what’s happening, clutching it as tightly as he can with the other hand, as if he can hold himself together so long as he stops the gap it represents.

He sees Tim fall, and he forget the rest of it. Struggles to get himself up, higher, because he can’t let it go on like that. Not Tim. It’s a simple enough thing to set his being by. Believes in it enough to drag himself back up to his feet.

He blunders into Danny without finesse or technique. Just wants to knock him back, knock him _off_ , maybe give Tim the time to crawl the rest of the way out into the corridor. Perhaps, he thinks, just maybe, if they could manage to get Danny back far enough, they might both be able to make it out there, and then they can lock him in.

If not, then Tim will just need to seal Martin in there with him.

Danny shoves Martin back almost casually, and he falls again. The impact tears through him, searing across his nerves – his world splits, and he has no way of telling if that’s just his injury, or if the ship has been hit again. There’s no time to work it out – he sees the flash of the knife, his own reflection in the blade.

He’s too far away. There’s nothing that he can do that can make him cross the distance in that time. Even if he’d been healthy, strong. It’s too far.

He finds the threads at his wrist, and he grabs for them, pulls, and tries to consider the space between the knife and Tim’s skin. Focus on it, and only it, for all that his vision is half pulsing and halos.

It is not, he tells himself, tries to do it in Jon’s voice just so he’ll believe it, a matter of inches – it is a grand, cavernous distance, as long as the line between him and Larkrest, that he can’t truly think he will ever cross again. That space could not be crossed by a bridge of dust motes, caught in the light through an open window. They couldn’t settle there, and at their scale, it’s an impossible feat.

They’re all at that scale, to something. Martin pulls on the threads, and the space there begins to shimmer, warping the light and the air around it.

Danny lets out a sharp cry of frustration. The arc of the knife will not complete, his arm moving sluggishly through it, slower than a thaw in midwinter.

Martin keeps his focus, his skull flashing with glimpses of the night sky, the broad sweep of midnight that sat between them and the stars. His vision turns red-rimmed, and he feels the first trickle of blood rising into his eyes, mingling with the tears that he’s already crying. He won’t hold it. The pressure is too much. But for the moment, at least, Danny could be trying to stab down for years and the knifepoint would never find Tim’s skin.

Danny’s head whips around, unnaturally far. He zeroes in on Martin, shoving away from Tim to turn towards him. Martin tries to recoil, the thread’s warping of space time snapping out of existence, but Danny doesn’t seem to notice. His hand finds its familiar place on Martin’s throat and wrenches him up like a ragdoll.

“You,” he snarls, giving him a brief, hard shake. Martin can’t draw in enough breath to scream anymore, even as his arm seems to ignite. “It’s your fault. He could be happy with me if you would just let him. You’re not going to keep us apart anymore. We’ll just have to use your skin.”

He drives Martin into the ground, pins him there, and the knife flashes – a slice to open his shirt, which dips too deep, draws a long thin line across his shoulder.

“He’ll always have you with him,” Danny goes on, his mouth curling around it, more of that wood-polish spittle flecking out with the words. “It’s more than you deserve.”

The first cut goes along his collarbone to the edge of his throat. He tries to cry out, but can’t muster anything more than a wheeze. It won’t be long, he thinks, wildly, before Danny won’t even need to bother holding him down anymore. He starts to peel the skin back, but it’s not clean, too much anger behind the hand.

There’s a crash that Martin is _sure_ must be a cannonball passing overhead, but what his eyes show him is Tim, bringing down the table on Danny’s back. It scatters off him in splinters, tearing the skin, but it doesn’t stop him.

Tim, at least, is screaming loud enough for both of them. Curses and fury, sob-edged. Martin wants to tell him to just go. Not to let Danny get what he wants, that it’s all worth it if Tim just gets to live, but even if he could speak, he knows Tim wouldn’t listen. He reaches around, wrenches the teapot spout out of Danny’s shoulder – there’s a rain of sawdust over his face, trickling against his raw flesh with a sting like biting ants.

Danny flips him over, straddling his lower back and pressing his face into the boards. He’s vaguely aware of his shirt being torn again, exposing a clearer stretch of skin, but keeps trying to crane his neck around for a glimpse of Tim. Fails.

There’s another crunch of wood – Martin doesn’t know what it is this time, but the weight over him is abruptly lifted. He lies there for a moment, and then starts to struggle over again, crawling up and around. His face swims past a spar of broken table leg, and he blinks at it, then dismisses it. He won’t be able to get enough force into a blow with it, not with only one working hand.

Past it, there’s a snarling, spitting heap of clothes, elbows and knees jabbing. Tim’s fighting. He’s not strong enough, won’t last, but he’s struggling with Danny, and Danny is at least not willing to hurt him – he’s trying to keep control of the knife, but not to plunge it wildly into Tim the way he might have done with Martin. Just trying to still it, even as Tim tries to grapple it up and around.

“Tim,” Danny says, a petulant whine. “Stop. We’re going to be brothers again. You can keep him, you’ll always have him, you just have to let me help you.”

“I,” Tim hisses, panting and rough. “Don’t – _want_ your _help_.”

Martin scrabbles for the threads at his wrist again, hoping to manage the same thing he had before, or even steal Danny’s balance, anything he can to help Tim, but he knows he’s spent, can only watch as Danny pulls the knife back, away, and Tim can’t keep hold of it. Danny’s too strong, even if Tim hadn’t already been too weak from the last thing that had been done to him in the name of family. 

“You’ll learn,” Danny says, simply.

Then the ship explodes.

* * *

Awareness and certainty return slowly, dripping like a faulty faucet through the ringing that sings in Jon’s ears like a finger circling a wine glass. He wipes something from his eyes, manages to push himself to his feet, wavers there for a moment before he staggers again, and has to grab onto what seems to be a mast – the wood is wind-smoothed beneath his hands, and his grip almost slips off it.

He manages a glance over his shoulder, towards the point of detonation, and his eyes catch on the bright, splotched colours of Nikola’s captain’s garb. She’s lying, partially under the broken mainmast, which has split her mask of a face in two – the nearest half stares up at Jon, painted into a grimace of pain.

He sets his back to it, and keeps going. Tim and Martin, he thinks, as firmly as he can. Almost there. But he doesn’t know how badly the explosion has damaged the ship, he has no idea how long he has, if he has any time at all, before the ship goes down.

The hatch down below decks is already open – it’s dark, below, but the right way. As he steps towards it, he’s nearly bowled over by someone else, crawling up and out of the dark, their eyes hollow and deep with fear they’ve lived in for weeks. There are patches of skin missing, leaving them a piebald thing of exposed muscle and bone. Jon tries to dodge out of the way, but it’s not him that they’re trying to get to – there’s a strange cry as they fall upon one of the long creatures on the deck, the aftermath of it aching in his chest.

Jon throws himself down the ladder, barely managing to avoid crashing into the people swarming up on the other side. He shoves his way through, struggling with his elbows – the press of people is so tight that it nearly suffocates him, shoulders being thrust into his chest. The smell of them hits hard enough on its own to nearly send him stumbling down to be trampled.

He keeps going, thrusting his way through, and then he finds space, air to breathe, the tangle of prisoners thinning as he moves further away from the way out. They’re all trying to get up, out, take the ship, perhaps, or just finally find a way to express what has been done to them in the flesh of their captors.

They’re not trying to turn down, into the warren of the crew’s quarters – maybe they will, later, when they don’t find adequate vengeance on deck, but for now Jon has the space to himself.

He makes all the turnings that he took from Tim’s memories, and as he does so he can feel the shape of Tim’s emotions as he’d made them – desperate hope and small certainty, beating wings in his chest so violently that it was a wonder he could walk at all.

Some of it, he thinks, might even be his own.

The door at the end of the last corridor is open, the shadows around it skewing the wrong way from how Jon remembers it. No good reason, he thinks, and starts to run. It seems to take him an age to get there, as if the corridor is spooled out across the whole of the sky. His feet thud in the right rhythm, his breath harshening, but he’s still too slow to cross.

Then his shoulder knocks into the doorjamb, and he’s peering around, his head a riot of his own heartbeat.

He sees the corpse first – it looks like Tim, enough to make his knees go week, but then he sees the exposed, splintered wood and loose skin that covers it, and almost sobs with relief.

Tim is lying on the ground a few inches away from it, and he has his arms so tight around Martin that Jon can hardly tell where one of them ends and the other begins. They’re both shaking, weeping. Something in him is revolted by the idea of looking at them, another private moment that he should have no part in, forces him to avert his eyes back to the dead monster on the floor.

There’s a knife, sticking out of its eye, dug in there up to the hilt, so deep that it must have found whatever essence it is that keeps these things moving, and put an end to it. There’s blood, too, forming splashed patterns against the blade, but it’s not the creature’s.

Jon blinks, and his mind fills in what doesn’t even really mean to know – that it should have been Tim’s, that it’s Martin. That when the ship had exploded, Tim and something that wasn’t his brother had been fighting, that in that single heartbeat, Tim had been able to get control of the knife again, and used it.

He shakes his head, and makes himself step close to them, crouches down. They don’t seem to notice him, can’t find room for anything else in their awareness. Only each other, the thing they have to keep safe.

“Martin?” he asks, and he keeps his voice as soft as he can, though the urgency in his chest wants him to shout, wants him to get them moving before the world comes pressing back in on the three of them, the ship shearing apart. “Tim?”

He doesn’t think that either of them has heard, for the longest time, and then they unfurl from each other, just slightly, just enough to look at him. His heart plummets, finds a new place somewhere in the cradle of his pelvis. It’s been so long since he has seen their faces, properly, with his own eyes and not theirs. He thinks that it might shatter him.

Neither of them seems to see him properly, and then Martin blinks, seems to pull himself back to wakefulness.

“Jon?” he says, and he sounds so achingly lost that Jon wants to lean over the rest of the way, wrap his arms around them and hold the three of them together himself.

“Yeah,” he says, settles for. “It’s me. I’ve come to get you out of here – can you stand?”

Martin takes a minute to assess, the seconds ticking past and screaming in Jon’s frantic thoughts, and then he gives a slow, weary nod.

“You need to help Tim,” he says, and he gives him a gentle nudge in Jon’s direction. Tim doesn’t react to it, but his hands seem to knot themselves tighter in Martin’s clothes. He won’t let go, Jon knows, just as he had about what had happened to Danny. He can sympathise, he decides. He wants to grab them and never let go, either. Promises himself that he will. But first, they have to go.

* * *

Tim knows that he should help. He can feel that Martin is trying, that Jon – _Jon_ , all the way out here, would swear that he’s imagined it except Martin seems to see him too – is trying, but he can’t. There’s nothing he can do, no strength left in his own body. It’s all gone, burnt up on the altar of trying to stop Danny hurting Martin, and he hadn’t even been able to do that.

Hadn’t been able to save Danny in the first place.

He keeps thinking that’s hit him. After every strike, believes it’ll be the last time that he grieves for Danny. It had taken years the first time, dragged him out into the sky, unable to see anything of it but his brother’s absence. Then when he’d found a monster in his place, empty-eyed and vicious.

Now. It should have been easy – it’s not like there was any other choice. Kill him, or watch him kill Martin. But he can’t stop thinking about it, replaying it in his head. The ship had kicked like every board of it was about to split in half, and Danny had been thrown clear of him. There had been only a second, and Tim had taken it – snatched the knife, plunged it into what he’d hoped might be a weak spot. The texture of Danny’s eye had been all wrong, seemed to splinter rather than puncture. Glass, maybe. It had turned Tim’s stomach even more than the magic that Danny had tried to drag him into, left him retching but still trying to yank his head around to keep watch. Danny’s hands had faltered, gone still against the deck, and hadn’t moved again.

Martin had come, though it had felt like it was years later, crawling agonisingly over to him, leaving a smear of blood against the ship behind him. He hadn’t said anything, though Tim had heard him taking breaths to, over and over until he had finally given up, and just let Tim cry into his shoulder. Martin, he thinks, had been shaking too. Barely anything of them left.

The two of them string him out between them, leave most of his weight flapping awkwardly against Jon. He tries to take steps with them, but his skin protests the movement like the flesh it sits over is sand, and he can’t seem to stop trembling. Jon drags him with him, keeps shooting sidelong glances Martin’s way, like he thinks he might need to hold him up, too.

It’s hardly a wild assumption. Martin looks worse than he does, blood tracking down his face and soaking past the tears in his shirt, though he’s done his best to hide the worst of it. He’s going to be freezing, though, up on deck – Tim blinks, stumbles in abrupt alarm, as his mind brings him some half-remembered reading that had told him most flaying victims died of cold.

He lurches backwards, trying to pull them in the direction of their cell, but all he manages to do is leave Martin wavering and unsteady where Tim still clings onto him, with an aching-tight grip that none of them have made any effort to pry free.

“We need to go,” Jon says, a soft darkness in his tone that should raise the hairs on the back of Tim’s neck.

“Our things,” Tim rasps, almost more than he can muster. _Can’t you see he’s not safe?_ he wants to snap, but even panic-fuelled he can’t spit it out. Maybe he’s remembered it wrong, or hadn’t understood it, but it’s still more of a risk than he wants to let them take.

“I’ll get them,” Jon says, gently letting Tim sway into the wall for support, and extracting himself. Clearly decides that it’s not worth the time that it’ll take them to argue about it.

“There’s not much,” Martin tells him. “There’s a bag under the bed and the coats on it – that’s it.”

Jon nods, and vanishes from view as Tim closes his eyes, leans into Martin’s chest, and tries to lose the shape of the world. Martin strokes his hair, one-armed. In the silence that sits where the sounds of war had, Tim can hear him breathing, rough with pain. It’ll only be a matter of time before he stops, too, last dregs of adrenalin trickling away.

They fade there, together, until Jon comes back, bag and coats slung over him, and pulls them both upright again, urging them on again. As he does, Tim catches sight of a pistol, holstered at his waist, and stares at it. It’s larger than the one that he’d bought from Dekker and Gerry, pure function, impossible to reconcile with the fussy, academically-inclined man that Tim remembers. 

They meet no one coming the other way – all hands lost, Tim hopes, no one else left to remember what Danny had become. The cage below the hatch hangs open, door off its hinges and the lock blown out. The only shapes left inside are stretches of exposed bone and muscle, unmoving and broken.

Tim averts his eyes, knots his fingers harder into Martin’s shirt, and keeps trying to get his legs under him.

“Martin can’t climb that,” he says, inclining his head towards the ladder up onto the deck. He doubts that he can, either, won’t get any better enough at supporting his own weight in the next few metres. 

“I’ll help you both,” Jon says, shortly. He doesn’t look at them, focussed on the task ahead like there’s nothing else in the world, and it’s so familiar on him that Tim’s throat tightens.

It’s still a struggle. Jon has to go up first, reaches down for Martin’s less damaged arm and hauls. Martin stumbles against the rungs, always seems a fraction of an inch from falling, dragging Jon down with him, but eventually he’s dragged out of sight, and Jon leans back down to help Tim. They manage, though by the time he’s crawling out onto the deck, he’s sure it’s all over. His muscles strain, beg for rest, and he wants to roll over onto his back, stare up in the hopes of glimpsing the sky past the sails. Lie there for the rest of time.

Jon doesn’t let him. The moment that he’s managed to get one of the coats wrapped around Martin, he’s crouching to drag Tim back up, do the same for him, though the material is heavy enough that Tim sags with the weight of it.

The deck around them is a ragged aftermath of chaos. The explosives that he’d planted had worked exactly like Dekker had said they would – the masts are down, sails fluttering in the wind like the feathers of broken wings. The boards are washed across with red, marred by a bright patchwork figure. There are more corpses, stretched out and picked over by the hungry, broken people from the cage, monsters torn down.

There’s another ship, close alongside, bound so close by ropes that Jon should be able to climb over. He notices a flash of dark green pennant, and almost laughs – of _course_ Jon would be on an Eye vessel.

“Those people,” Tim manages, groping for Jon’s arm. “Can we help them?”

“I’ll talk to Melanie,” Jon tells him, the tone of it placating. He doesn’t look at the figures around them, only seems to be aware of them at all when he has to shuffle Tim and Martin around one. “Let’s get the two of you safe.”

Safe. Tim has no idea how long it’s been since he’s felt that way, has long since lost track of the days since they’d been taken from Larkrest. He should protest it, treat it as the myth he’d started to consider it as, but when Jon promises it, he’s content to believe it.

Jon. He gazes at him, as they close the last few metres to the side. There are angles to him now that Tim doesn’t recognise, a hardness he hadn’t expected. His presence is almost tangibly _right_ , a part of home, like an old family dog settling at a fireside, and Tim wonders at that. Whether, like Martin, it had been that way for years and he just hadn’t noticed until he was given cause to.

“What are you doing here?” he blurts out. It encompasses so many more questions,hows and whys that he hasn’t the voice to ask. 

“I came to get you,” Jon says, like it’s simple. Natural. As if they’d only made it as far as the next town over. Tim wants to kiss him, see where it goes, how it reconciles the web of love that binds them together, but his face is bloodied, and Tim has no desire to taste it on an already delicate stomach. Probably couldn’t even reach, hanging as he is.

They reach the side, and Jon props them against it. He goes to heave Martin over first, presumably so that he can help with Tim, but a few other hands come over, grim-faced and resolute, and they help the three of them through the climb. Martin waits for him anyway, and if it weren’t for the way that they hold onto each other, Tim would fall to the deck of the new ship and weep into the boards.


	20. Chapter 20

Martin can feel eyes on them. They shuffle through the ship that Jon had come on, apparently heading for a spare cabin, and the back of his neck prickles with the knowledge that they’re being studied. He thinks of Jon at first, pacing ahead of them, but he only seems to look back when an awkward step leaves Martin hissing, snapping at the people helping them – they _had_ given their names, but they had refused to stick in his blurring head – to be more careful. As they turn corners, however, he catches sight of other crew members, carefully turning their backs, finding casual ways to lean, and refusing to look anywhere near them.

He wonders how many of them had died trying to rescue the two of them from the Stranger, whether they’ll be found wanting in exchange. They at least don’t look at him how Danny had, have no immediate or obvious desire to hurt him, so he’s too tired to care much. Just passes them without a word, levels his own attention at the backs of Jon’s boots and leaves it there.

Tim is equally silent. He still holds onto him, grip leaving creases in Martin’s shirt that he doubts will ever leave the fabric, even though it would probably be easier if they let the crew support them separately. He seems to be taking a little more of his own weight, now, though it’s difficult to be sure – he could hardly be taking less. Better for no longer being on that ship, Martin hopes.

The room that they’re shown to is unusually open – not compared to Mike’s cabin, but after so long stuck in the cell on the Stranger ship it might as well be. There’s a small double bed that makes him think it was for a couple, once, or maybe someone of higher rank, and a window set into one wall that’s large and low enough for him to see a little of the view through it. 

The crew helps them to the bed, and then ducks out with a few uncomfortable nods to Jon, which he returns with just as much fluency. He makes his way over to them, his brow creased like he’s been trying to work at a puzzle. Once, he might have asked what was bothering him, offered his help, but his brain is too full of fog for him to imagine he might be of any use.

“The ship’s doctor should be on her way soon,” Jon says, then stops to clear his throat, uncertain. “There are a few injuries up on deck that she’s tending to. It’s probably easier for her to see you both in here, but if you’d rather have separate rooms–”

“No,” Tim snaps, so hard and fast that Martin can tell it’s out of panic, isn’t meant to cut at Jon. “No.”

“We’ll stay together,” Martin says, more softly. He wraps his good arm carefully around Tim’s shoulder, watching for any flinches to tell him that he’s hit a sensitive patch of skin, but Tim just leans into him, craning his neck around as if to keep him in view.

“All right.” Jon glances towards the door, left ajar by the retreating hands. “If you need me, I – my cabin is on the other side of the ship. By the engine. If you want anything. I… could stay here? Just for the moment, if you want me to?” His gaze settles on the deck at his feet, as if he’s repelled by them. “Or, maybe I should just go and talk to the doctor myself. I’ll… be back soon.”

Martin tries to ask him not to leave, but by the time the words have formulated in his throat, he’s already gone, shutting the door behind him with a soft click of hinges. Doesn’t lock it – the key is sticking out on their side, and Martin blinks at it like he’s never seen one before.

“We’ll talk to him later,” Tim says. His voice breaks a little over the words, thick and aching.

Martin turns back towards him, concerned, only for Tim to hook one wrist over the back of his neck, and pull him down into a kiss. It’s slow, careful, like he’s concerned he might break them, lips soft and thumb smoothing over Martin’s spine. The kind of kiss that Martin’s had a void in his chest from missing, since Danny had attacked him.

Tim pulls back, with a tired smile, and subsides the rest of the way onto the blankets.

“We’re safe,” he says. The word snags in Martin’s thoughts, sits there and waits for him to be able to comprehend the enormity of it. They’re somewhere else, now. It’s over. They don’t have to be afraid anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Martin tells him. It spills out like sand from a punctured bag, no longer sitting in a tight coil of regret behind his sternum.

Tim frowns, pauses a moment like he’s running it over in his head, making sure that he’d heard it properly.

“What the fuck do _you_ have to be sorry for?” he asks, finally.

“Your brother,” Martin says, with a half-shrug. Winces, as the movement jars the raw place over his shoulder, where Danny had taken a strip of his skin. “You had to…”

“That wasn’t him.” Tim closes his eyes, his hold finally slipping off Martin’s shirt, only to scrabble for his hand. “I don’t think it had been him for a very long time.”

“It was once, though.” Martin hesitates, trying to find a way to put the sentence together that doesn’t feel wrong, trite, wishes he could leave it for later but is half-certain he’ll lose the nerve. “And it’s okay to… I’m still sorry. You shouldn’t have had to go through that.”

“Neither should you.” There’s a little too much venom there, hatred lending strength to his voice. “I did what I had to. Couldn’t let him hurt you anymore. I’m not saying I’m not going to be feeling it for a long time, but… I’m not going to regret it, either.”

Martin manages a weak smile that Tim doesn’t see, and slowly starts to lever himself down onto the bed beside him. It’s difficult work – his arm just wants to give out, make him rest by force if necessary – and by the time that he’s lying down, he can feel that it’s taken the last of his strength.

The pattern of the boards across the ceiling is unfamiliar. Martin feels a grin creep across his face, his head rushing. It hardly feels real.

“We’re going home,” he says, marvels at the shape of the word against his lips.

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Yeah, we are.” He gives Martin’s fingers a gentle squeeze, grounding. “Need to stay awake a bit longer though. Doctor’s coming.”

Martin hums. He thinks he can feel the ship casting off, a faint shudder through the decks as it pulls away from the Stranger vessel. It’s a slightly different key, he thinks, the hum of the engine distinct enough that he hopes he won’t dream they’re back there.

Despite his best intentions, by the time that the knock at the door comes, he’s starting to drift. He manages to call out for them to come in, but can’t quite make himself focus on the ship’s doctor’s face. He lies back and lets himself be tended to, obeys the orders he’s given and is far more aware of Tim’s weight on the bed beside him than he is of the doctor’s ministrations. She gives him something for the pain he can hardly separate from himself anymore, and then begins to check over Tim.

He hears her leave again, then feels the distant brush of Tim’s lips against his forehead as he shifts, curling closer to him, settling them together the way that they had been on Mike’s ship. Then peace, of sleep deeper than he’s had for what feels like years.

* * *

Jon doesn’t know how long he spends wandering the ship. Too long, he’s sure – when he remembers to look again, they’ve cast away from the Stranger ship. It’s a smudge at the horizon again, just a part of the distance. Sailing on, despite the ruin that the battle had made of it. He settles against the railing to watch it fade from view. Hates it, with a violence deep enough that it should scorch it, turn it into a flare on the edge of his awareness.

“Jon?”

He flinches, turns to sees Melanie, striding towards him. Her face is soot-stained, set. He offers a tight smile that he has to put far too much effort into in response.

“I’m sorry about your men,” he tells her. Doesn’t know how many other hands she’d lost – there’s a deep pockmark in the deck where one of the Stranger’s cannonballs had hit home, a ragged tear through one of their sails, but from what he’s seen, they came off far better. Doubts that it’s much consolation, when faced with lost lives.

“Nothing you could’ve done,” she says. “We knew what we were getting ourselves into with the attack. It wasn’t your decision.”

“Elias told me to go in alone,” Jon reminds her, even as she shakes her head, takes his arm to draw him away. “And maybe he was right. If it had just been me–”

“Then maybe she would’ve just killed you first,” Melanie snaps. “Look. I’m not here to talk about them. I’ll do that later, when I’m writing to their families. Just wanted to check in on you. How are your friends?”

Jon sighs out, and feels the answer spring obligingly into his head, far too easily. He knows where they are, knows what they’re dreaming of, knows where they will ache in the morning. That they sleep together, so closely that there might as well be no space between them.

“Martin’s injured,” he says. It’s difficult to keep it steady, as more understanding falls into place, unbidden. Martin’s going to have scars. Tim will hurt every time that he ever sees them. “Tim’s still recovering – his… a monster tried to involve him in Stranger magic, and his body is rejecting it. They’ll both get better, in time.”

“Why aren’t you with them?” Melanie prods, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve spent long enough trying to get them back – what are you doing out here? I assumed you’d be inseparable.”

“They’re sleeping.”

“Don’t fob me off with that.”

“I see too much of them.” Jon gives a short, curt shrug, as if there’s anything that the motion could do to deflect her from his words. “Things that should be private. Theirs. Since Nikola, I can’t seem to stop it. I think I might have gone too far.”

Melanie frowns. She reaches for his arm, pulls a familiar strip of black cloth from her pocket, and presses it into his palm, closes his fingers around it. He wants to let go. Wants to hurl it out onto the breeze, then go below decks and wash his hands until his skin stops itching.

“It might work for that, too,” she says. “I know I didn’t go quite as far as you – my magic faded on its own, after a month or so.”

“You don’t think…” Jon trails off, not sure how to word the question of whether or not he’s past the point of no return, whether the part of him that’s involved with the magic is going to reach critical mass.

“You’ve still got the same number of eyes you had when we met,” Melanie says, with a wan smirk. It’s an ill-timed attempt at a joke, but he forces a laugh anyway. “I don’t know, Jon. You’re worth trying it. I’m sure it’ll be a long recovery, but just… wear that when it gets too much, and it’ll stop you.”

“Thank you.” Jon pushes the blindfold into his pocket, and shoves away the insistent voice telling him to leave it there, that Melanie won’t know if he never takes her advice. “What will you do, now?”

“I’ve got time to decide,” Melanie says, and he can tell she’s noticed the clumsy change of subject, is just willing to let it pass. “I think I’ll see how captaincy suits me. I can’t stay ashore until I can properly hide myself anyway.”

“I think you can do whatever you put your mind to,” Jon says. There’s not a word of flattery in it, to his mind.

“I know.” Melanie gives him a brief, sharp smile. “Second order of business is to figure out what to do with Elias. Maybe Simon Fairchild will want him, get you off the hook for that favour.”

“I… don’t think that would count?” Jon hazards, softens his tone to try to indicate that he’s grateful for the offer. “He’s given no indication that he _wants_ Elias. And besides, that would be something from you, not me.”

“You’re the reason I didn’t kill him in the first place,” Melanie reasons. She’s firm with it, not willing to let him argue. “So that probably makes it from you, in the longer term. Is there something else you want done with him?”

“No, no.” Jon shakes his head, glances back in the direction that the Stranger ship had taken. “I’m not interested in what happens to him. What was the first thing you wanted to do?”

“Take you wherever you wanted to go.” Melanie follows his eyes, then shifts around to block his view. “It’s not that I’m in a hurry to get you off the ship…”

“I’m sure you need the space for someone with more experience.”

Melanie knocks her shoulder lightly into his, a brusque sort of affection that he knows he’s going to miss, when it comes to it.

“Where will it be, then?” she prompts.

“Home.” It’s soft in Jon’s mouth, an aftertaste of how it had felt in Martin’s. “Larkrest.” Melanie’s face blanks, not even the slightest flicker of recognition there. “Where I came aboard? I’ll find it on a map for you. Tim and Martin are… looking forward to getting back.”

“And you?”

“I am, too, I just…” Jon swallows, gestures towards the place where the Stranger ship had vanished. “Was there anything we could’ve done for them?”

“We didn’t have space for them all,” Melanie tells him. “But they’re not too far from Haukston. I had some people set them up a replacement mast, set a course. The ship will last them there, and I imagine they’re well used to taking in the Stranger’s leftovers. My question?”

“They’re just so in love!” It feels stupid, when he finally lets it burst out of him. Leaves a bitter taste on his lips, entitled and inadequate. “They’re so wrapped up in each other. I don’t know if there’s any space left there for me.”

“Weren’t you in love with both of them?” Melanie’s only judgement on him is to raise an eyebrow, and he’s grateful for that.

“I… am,” Jon admits. It’s the first time he’s managed it, aloud. Doesn’t feel right, like it should have been to them or come out easier or _something_ else.

“So, what’s the problem?” Melanie prods his arm, pushing him into moving again – they’re heading for the steering column, like she plans to take over from Fiona. Maybe she just wants to give him a tangible end to the conversation, make it easier for him to get his thoughts in order, like he’d always heard that a journey was a good time to have an argument. “You’re worried they don’t feel the same, _because_ they have each other?”

“Yes.” Jon lets himself be led, physically and verbally. Simpler that way.

“And you can’t just know whether they do or not?”

“No.” He winces at the idea, sure that it shouldn’t work like that, that it wouldn’t be _right_. Things with them should be. “Maybe if they did, I would have?” He shoots a glance at Melanie, trying to gauge how she’s taking it. Can’t. “Are you going to tell me to believe in myself?”

“No.” Melanie gives him a gentle shove in the direction of the hatch, and swats his arm in a way he thinks is meant to be encouraging. “Just go and talk to them. You live in the same house. You can’t avoid them forever.”

It’s a good enough reason. Although he’s sure it’s entirely possible that they’ll just be spending all of their time in the attic with Martin’s creatures, once they get back, so it might not be quite as difficult as Melanie thinks.

She’d tell him it’s a poor excuse, and she’d be right.

He goes where he’s told. They’re still sleeping, so he just gets a chair, and sets it down outside their door, unwilling to disturb them. What he can do, for himself as much as for them, is sit and wait and guard them from anything else that might mean to do them harm.

* * *

Morning comes. It doesn’t all burst like a soap bubble, beautiful and ever so fragile. Tim almost expects it to, is near-certain that if he closes his eyes too hard, he’ll open them back in the bowels of the Stranger ship, curled in the half-light with Martin, but the only sight he’s granted is of the sunrise gleam from the window falling across the bed beside him, picking out the detail of Martin’s face.

He looks so fragile, still, his arm carefully bound and his chest cocooned in bandages. Doesn’t move, when Tim tucks in against the back of his neck and spends a moment breathing him in. Still aches, himself, but being affectionate with Martin again, without the constant needling of fear through his head, is worth the discomfort. Doesn’t want to fold away another moment that he should spend kissing him, lose any more time.

The ship rolls a little with the wind, and Tim relaxes again, imagines it carrying them all the way home again. When he pictures it, it’s no longer some impossible distance, a fairy tale which will never come true for the likes of him, but a tangible, knowable thing. A promise to be fulfilled.

He watches the shades of the clouds change through the window, and listens to Martin’s breathing, steady and deep, until there’s a soft knock at the door. It wakes him, with a soft sigh and a shift closer into Tim.

“Hello?” Tim calls, tries to clamp down on the suspicion in his voice. This isn’t the place for it. He knows that, knows that no one here is going to hurt them, but he still eyes the threshold, unable to blink.

The door opens, slowly, and Jon pokes his head around, gives an awkward wave.

“It’s only me,” he says, and risks stepping around, into the room. Still close enough that he could duck out at a moment’s notice. He’s washed the blood from his face, there’s something tied around his throat like a scarf, black and neatly embroidered with a vague, repeating pattern, and he’s holding a tray against his chest like it’s a shield. “Fiona brought me some food for you, and I’ve got some painkillers from the doctor.”

“Martin?” Tim says, propping himself slowly up, and giving Martin a light nudge on his good arm. “Breakfast.”

“I can just leave it…” Jon hesitates, glancing around the room as if in search of an adequate surface. “Over there–”

“No.” Martin’s voice is sleep-muffled but still vehement – he pulls at Tim’s arm in an effort to drag himself upright, almost enough to haul him back down. “Jon – stay. Please.”

“Fine, fine.” Jon shifts the tray awkwardly onto one arm, and then leans back out into the corridor, hooking a chair in behind him with a scrape of the legs against the deck.

“What’s that doing out there?” Tim asks – he doesn’t remember it being there before, probably would have tripped over it in the narrow space if it had been.

“I was… guarding you,” Jon says, his cheeks flushing. He makes far too much of finding an appropriate place to settle it.

“Oh.” Tim pauses, goes to cough and then stifles it at the concerned looks it earns him. “What from?”

“It just made me feel better,” Jon says. He sits, settles his legs out a little too far and immediately goes about adjusting them. “And I want you to feel safe. Know you’re safe. I know you haven’t been for a long time, and… it’s nice to be sure. After you were taken…” He hesitates, like he’s searching for a way to explain how it had felt, what had driven him to this, but he just gives a minute shake of his head, and keeps talking. “I came looking. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Tim assures him. It’s true – what had been a surety that his skin no longer belonged to him has settled into an itch and a low ache, a vague sense of weakness instead of an all-pervading one. “Maybe being away from… here. Maybe being here is helping. Martin?”

Martin grimaces, still leaning heavily against Tim, and gestures for the painkillers.

Jon springs up again to bring them over – places a hand on Martin’s back as he does so, almost unconsciously and with an exaggerated care that Tim thinks he recognises, from the aftermath of the vase. Then he flinches away when Tim goes to steady Martin’s grip on his glass, takes a full pace backwards.

“I should leave–”

“ _No_ ,” Martin says again, angles his head painfully up to pin Jon with his stare. “Jon, please. We want you here.”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened after we were taken?” Tim suggests, gestures for him to sit on the bed beside them. Jon doesn’t, just glances back towards the chair, and Tim has to lunge out, grab him by the wrist and pull him down himself. 

“There’s not much to tell,” Jon says. It’s pockmarked with hesitation, things that he doesn’t seem to know how to word. “Sasha told me what happened.”

“Was she all right?”

“She was injured but the doctors seemed to think that she’d recover.” Jon glances down takes an edge of the blanket in his fingers and starts to worry at it. “I’ve been writing to her. You can, too, if you like – I’m sure she’ll be relieved to hear from you. If you’re not up to it you can just tell me what you’d like to say and I can– Anyway, I signed on with this ship to come and get you – my friend Melanie is the captain now, we had to... mutiny, a bit.”

He hesitates again, and refolds his legs in a different direction. Keeps fidgeting, apparently finding it no more comfortable.

“What’s eating you?” Tim demands, when it doesn’t stop. If it hadn’t been for the assurances he’d already given, he would have assumed that something had happened to Sasha, that Jon’s trying not to tell them things that might impact their recovery. As he speaks, he reaches automatically for Martin’s hand, and catches the movement as Jon’s eyes flit to follow it. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Jon echoes. He goes completely still, his expression abruptly stricken. “What’s _oh_?”

“Jon…” Tim glances sideways at Martin, waits to catch his eye, and then tips his head towards Jon, asking silently if he would rather tell him himself. Martin, still pain-fogged, just gives him a tiny nod, and laces their fingers more comfortably together. “You do know that we love you, right?”

“No?” Jon’s back on his feet before the word’s even fully out of his mouth, his back on them, as he paces away. Swings around before he’s further than the chair, and looks back at them, as if to check they’re still there. “No, how would I know…?”

“It’s fine,” Martin mutters. “It’s going around, apparently.”

“I did just tell you,” Tim says, to Jon, rather than taking the opportunity to tease Martin. It wouldn’t be his best work, anyway. “So you can take it from that. Martin and I… we missed you. So please just stop worrying about whether or not you’re allowed and just sit down and be _here_ , all right?”

“All right,” Jon says, but from the time he takes over it, Tim doubts that it is. He casts a hesitant, lingering glance over to Martin. “Martin, are you… do you agree with this?”

Only _Jon_ would phrase it like it’s some kind of opening argument at a court hearing.

“Yeah.” Martin doesn’t quite meet Jon’s eye, like he’s somehow still expecting that Jon doesn’t feel the same, and Tim can _feel_ Jon misconstruing it.

“Martin’s been in love with you for years,” he announces, ignores Martin’s scandalised glance, hopes that he’ll understand that he’s doing it for his own good.

“Oh.” Jon fidgets again, but at least he starts to do it vaguely back in their direction. “Can I…?”

“Whatever it is, absolutely,” Tim tells him, forces as much certainty into it as he can.

“Yes,” Martin echoes. Seems like he’s going to go onto something more, but before he gets the chance, Jon is striding back towards him as if he’s trying to race his own doubts. He leans down, kisses him – it’s just for a second. So fleeting it’s hardly there, leaves him straightening up like it had burned him, brow knit and eyes searching Martin’s face for his reaction.

Tim pulls him down into something more thorough. Jon’s uncertain, still, completely, and he doesn’t push it – just make sure the press of lips lasts long enough for him to understand that it’s not somehow a mistake or misunderstanding, and they’ll work on the rest of it later, once they’ve all got used to that.

“ _Stay_ ,” he says, again, and this time, Jon doesn’t need to be forced into taking his place on the bed next to them.

“Um,” he says, awkward, impulsive. “You should know that this is… I mean, I don’t–”

“We’ll work through it as we go along,” Tim tells him, as firmly as he can, because he can _hear_ Jon trying to talk himself out of it, out of them, and they’ve missed out on far too much already. “If that’s all right with you?”

Jon pauses. Nods. Manages a thin, difficult smile. It’s a start. A start, Tim knows, from the way that he softens as he looks at them, finally seems to relax, of something that matters.

* * *

They’re almost there now. Jon stands at the rail of Melanie’s ship, listening to the noise of the wind in the sails, and squinting to make out Larkrest’s dock in the distance. The air is fresh and clear, the chill of autumn just starting to set in, and he breathes it like it’s cleansing everything else out of him. From this far away, it looks like it never was attacked by Stranger ships, and he hopes that that will hold, as they continue their approach.

“How long?” Tim takes his place beside him, leans on the side, letting the breeze ruffle his hair like its only purpose is to make him look as striking as possible.

“Minutes,” Jon guesses, and offers him a small smile. He’s watched Melanie’s ship pull into harbour enough times now that he thinks it’s a fair estimate, though he can’t quite judge it from the sounds around him the way that she can.

“It’ll be good to see it all again,” Martin says, from Tim’s other side. He settles awkwardly there, his arm clearly still bothering him, but none of it shows in his expression. “I’m starting to forget what the museum looks like.”

Tim moves to accommodate him, doesn’t seem to notice that he’s doing it – they’re so close, so comfortable around each other, that Jon can no longer imagine either of them alone. Still distinct, in their own ways, but their names are bound in his thoughts, and he has no desire to separate them.

“I expect Sasha’s been running the place brilliantly,” he says.

“I’m sure,” Jon agrees. Their last few letters to her had been rambling, long enough that they’ve almost run out of paper again, their excitement picking up with every stop closer to home. It feels like a physical thing, now, charging the air around them with a contented sort of expectation.

The three of them settle into a companionable silence. Jon moves a little closer to them, though he keeps his eyes on Larkrest as it grows larger and larger. It’s comfortable, feels only natural for him to take his place beside them, and from what they tell him, with their words and their touches and their glances, they sense that too.

“We’re just coming into the dock now!”

Melanie’s voice. Jon glances around at her, just in time to see her give him a sharp grin and duck away. She’s assured him she’ll write, do her best to keep him informed of their course so that he can reply, visit whenever she’s in the area. He’ll still miss her, but she seems to share in his anticipation of homecoming, takes on tasks she’d normally delegate just to see them safely into port.

She moves to the side, ready to direct the lowering of the gangway, and Jon pushes his attention back to the front, something surging in his chest. He steps sideways, so that he can wrap one arm around Tim and the other around Martin, in a brief hug. Wants to be able to hold them, as the ship start to shudder with proximity, feel for certain that he’s brought them home.

Just as on the ferry, all that time ago, their bags have been left on the deck behind them. They have more than they’d started with – Melanie had insisted on giving to Jon as payment for his services, a cut of Elias’ money, as if the attack on the Stranger and passage back to Larkrest hadn’t been enough, somehow – but they’d still managed to pack away everything important. The blindfold is the exception, still knotted around his neck, too much risk that a stray breeze might snatch it from anywhere else.

He ties it over his eyes every night, and during the day, if it gets too much. It doesn’t stop everything unless he wears it properly, but for all that some days it feels as if it’s choking him, the frequency of his intrusions has certainly decreased. It’s been days since he’s caught any of Tim’s or Martin’s stray memories, and it’s better that way. Their joys and traumas are their own, to explain to him in their own time. 

The three of them leave the ship together, Tim and Martin holding hands ahead when the gangway is too narrow for them all to walk abreast, but they stop to wait for him at the very edge of the jetty, slow and meant. Jon takes Tim’s offered arm, and they walk up towards the village proper.

There are a couple of figures, waiting just past the dock – as they approach, one of them rushes towards them, resolves into Sasha. Her face is wide and smiling, the only trace of the injury that Jon had last seen her with a small scar vanishing into her hairline.

“Jon!” she calls, as if they might somehow have missed her. Jon blinks, trying to clear an abrupt blur from his eyes. “Tim! Martin!”

She throws her arms wide, and the grey-furred creature that sits on her shoulder chitters out an alarm at Jon, remembers him, doesn’t associate him with good memories.

“Sasha!” Martin beams, returns her hug with an incline of his head that should be awkward, were it not for the clear happiness in his face. Tim’s next, leans into her and then glances hard away, as if he’s trying to hide that he’s feeling it as deeply as Jon is.

Him, she’s not quite sure of – hesitates, before she reaches for him, as if she’s uncertain of his stance on hugs, remembers another man who had held her and everyone else at arm’s length. He holds out the arm not attached to Tim, and she steps into it, clinging for a moment.

“Who’s this?” Martin asks, and indicates the little grey thing with a nod. It’s a little brighter than he has been, overcompensating so as not to worry her, but he’ll settle soon enough.

“Wolfgang.” Sasha holds her hand up next to it, and it skitters obediently onto it, blinking its large eyes in Martin’s direction. “Jon brought him back from the Sandstone Market for you. I hope you don’t mind that I named him.”

“No,” Martin assures her, without reaching for it. “It looks like he likes you – how are the others?”

“All fine,” Sasha says. “Though I had to let some of them go – I made as many sketches as I could. I’ll show you when we get back, though. First–” Sasha turns on her heel, waves to the person who had been waiting for her. “This is Georgie. She’s been helping me out with the museum while you’ve been away.”

“Georgie?” Jon echoes. She nods to him, assessing, and there are hundreds of things he wants to ask – how she’s been, if she’s happy, why she had chosen to come to Larkrest even after hearing what had happened, but none of those are what falls from his lips. “What about your collection?”

“It’s surviving just fine on its own,” Georgie tells him, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It’s good to see you too, Jon.”

Jon opens his mouth to apologise, but someone shoves past him to hold out a hand. Melanie, with a brighter, wider smile than Jon has ever seen from her before, her back held straight and eyes sparkling.

“Melanie King,” she says. “Captain. I’ve been looking after Jon.”

“Georgie Barker.” Georgie takes Melanie’s hand without hesitation, and grins back. “I run a museum in Dalport with a bit more of a magic focus.” 

“Oh?” Melanie doesn’t let go, and doesn’t seem to notice. “Sounds fascinating.”

“It really is,” Sasha adds, stepping back to Georgie’s side. “You should see it, I think we’re going to learn a lot…”

Jon leaves them to it, gently guiding Tim and Martin along with him. He’d prefer to save the better part of the reunions for when they’re home again. The other two seem to understand – Martin pulls ahead a little, the softening light glancing off the thread that he wears around his wrist. Tim keeps up with him easily, and Jon is content to trail a little as they begin to cut through the narrower streets.

He wants to see it, when they get there. To watch them go ahead of him, safe, make it true again that there is no part of any journey that he likes better than homecoming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you liked the fic, and extra thanks to those who take the time to comment or kudos. Please, however, do not include unsolicited criticism in your responses. I understand that you feel you are helping and am grateful for the intention, but if I am looking for concrit, I will post to my writing group or request a beta read.


End file.
